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Car belonged to Jesuits’ maintenance worker
Karl Schembri
Arsonists torched a car in the street of the Prime Minister’s residence in Marsaskala on Thursday, MaltaToday has discovered. They carried out their action minutes after the police sentry outside ended his duty. There is no security at the PM’s residence after 5am in the morning.
Just a couple of doors away from Lawrence Gonzi’s private residence in Triq iz-Zafran, a Fiat Uno car that belonged to a maintenance worker at St Aloysius College was torched at around 5.10am last Thursday, only 10 minutes after the guard outside the prime minister’s house had left his sentry post. Though the arson attack was reported in the press no reference was made to the fact that the incident took place metres away from the PM’s residence.
Sources close to the prime minister say the arson was “well thought out”.
“Whoever did it must have planned it to time with the end of the guard duty, at 5am,” sources said.
Once the shift is terminated, the guard outside the prime minister’s house is not replaced until the following evening, in line with the “minimalist, low key” security approach of Gonzi’s advisors. There are no surveillance cameras outside the house.
While investigators and the office of the prime minister still say the motive of the arsonists remains unclear, the vandalism was only one in a string of arsons targeting the Jesuits and people working with them, particularly with asylum seekers. Last week, the residence door and car of lawyer Katrine Camilleri, who works with the Jesuit Refugee Service, were set ablaze in Tas-Sliema, and in March cars owned by the Jesuit community were totally destroyed in flames in a similar attack at night. (Interview, Fr Paul Pace, pages 26, 27)
The investigators are however also faced with other attacks whose connection remains unclear. The attack on the car of the Jesuits’ maintenance worker raises more questions for the police, while two other attacks carried in the early hours of the following day seem even more mysterious.
On Friday, two other cars, one in Triq Wied il-Ghajn, Haz-Zabbar, and another in Triq Fontanier, Hal Qormi, were set ablaze at around 2.30am and 3.30am respectively, but so far no connection with the Jesuits has been established.
The arsons are being investigated separately by different inquiring magistrates, while police investigators still seem to be without a clue about the perpetrators.
Among the first suspects, the police interrogated a number of people and confiscated computers over the last months after tracking them from their hate messages posted on fascist websites on the internet.
Meanwhile internet forums run by Maltese white supremacists, neo-Nazis and right wing radicals continue to remain ambiguous in their reactions to the arsons, with the most shocking statement made by the fanatical anti-immigration campaigner Norman Lowell, who said such arsons “will inevitably escalate due to the exasperation of our people, in the face of the continuous invasion of our country by illegal immigrants”.
About the arsons, he says “we do not need such actions” but “this is simply the people responding to an outside threat since it feels abandoned by the political class”.
For sure, Lowell and his disciples are revelling in the chaos: they have also opened whole message threads dedicated to the Jesuits, denigrating them unrelentingly for the work they do with migrants and refugees and posting cheap paranoid popular fiction about the order being an underground network of freemasons.
It is also ironic that the immigrant haters whose rhetoric is full of crass generalisations about blacks, are now playing victims of generalisations about them in the wake of the terrorist acts on the Jesuits, with some of them going as far in their loony claims as alleging that the Jesuits set their own cars on fire to generate sympathy.
kschembri@mediatoday.com.mt
Links: www.maltatoday.com.mt/2006/04/16/editorial.html
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