WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has announced that he’ll pay €20,000 to anyone who can provide information about the killers of Maltese journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia, who died after her car exploded near her home in Bidnija, northern Malta, at around 3pm on Monday.
Maltese police have determined that a car bomb was responsible and have opened a murder investigation.
In a post on Twitter, Julian Assange expressed his shock at Caruana Galizia’s death and offered cash reward to anyone who can provide information about her murderers.
— Julian Assange 🔹 (@JulianAssange) October 16, 2017
In 2016, Caruana Galizia was named one of Politico’s “28 people who are shaping, shaking and stirring Europe.” The US news outlet described her as a “one-woman WikiLeaks.”
Most recently she had accused Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, and his wife Michelle of being involved in corruption. She produced a document claiming US$1 million from Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of the President of Azerbaijan, had been paid into an offshore account belonging to Michelle Muscat.
Mario Cacciottolo, a Maltese journalist interviewed by Sputnik, said that there would be a "huge parade of suspects” following her death.
"It might look as if it was linked to Maltese politics. But the net they will cast will have to be very wide because she had recently been looking into money laundering. There are suspicions, voiced by people like Daphne that Malta is a fertile place for money laundering, but nothing's been proven. Because the economy is booming it has become an attractive place for money laundering because there is so much legitimate money sloshing around and she had been looking into that," Mr. Cacciottolo told Sputnik.
Following her untimely death, her son Matthew Caruana Galizia, wrote an emotional post on Facebook describing in vivid detail what happened in the aftermath of the explosion.
He also lashed out at several Maltese politicians, including Muscat, and blasted the “culture of impunity (which) has been allowed to flourish by the government in Malta.”
Maltese TV station TVM reported that Caruana Galizia had filed a complaint with the police two weeks before her murder, saying she had received threats, but gave no further information.
