[WATCH] Beppe Fenech Adami warns Malta has major crime problem, says Joseph Muscat is out of touch

The murder of Lassana Cisse Souleymane has further shown that Malta is not a safe country, the PN says

Beppe Fenech Adami has accused the Prime Minister of being 'brazen faced' when declaring Malta is a safe country
Beppe Fenech Adami has accused the Prime Minister of being 'brazen faced' when declaring Malta is a safe country
Beppe Fenech Adami denies PN rhetoric on foreigners contributed to climate of hate

Beppe Fenech Adami has accused the Prime Minister of being in a state of denial when describing Malta, a “safe place” after two soldiers were charged with racial murder.

The Nationalist Party MP said Joseph Muscat was “brazen faced” and out of touch with what people were feeling.

“Honest people no longer feel safe in a country where a man is killed because he is black, a journalist is killed for doing her job, an elderly woman is mugged and higher theft is recorded as a result of organised crime,” Fenech Adami said.

He was reacting in the wake of the developments over the weekend that saw the police charge two soldiers with the murder of an Ivorian man and the attempted murder of three other migrants.

Fenech Adami said the case shocked the country and Muscat’s use of the words “Malta is a safe place” in a tweet over the weekend was out of touch with what people were feeling.

But the former PN deputy leader rejected suggestions that the PN’s rhetoric about the excess number of foreigners on the island could contribute to a climate of hatred towards foreigners.

“The PN’s criticism is that the government has based economic growth on population growth. With all due respect, it has nothing to do with [the creation of a] racist element,” Fenech Adami told MaltaToday.

He said the PN understood that, as a result of Malta’s EU membership, foreigners would come to Malta. “But Muscat based the economy purely on increasing population size.”

Referring to Muscat, the PN MP said that racist was he who “fooled the Maltese people [into believing] that there is a solution to the big challenges faced by the EU in the last years” in relation to migration.

He went on to link the government's immigration policy to the current situation Malta was facing, where two soldiers had killed a migrant.

“Muscat spoke of pushbacks and put this into action, so much so that he left women and children stranded for weeks at sea in winter, to appear strong, populist and to attract votes,” Fenech Adami charged.

He added that a number of years after the Prime Minister had started to adopt such an attitude in relation to migration, Malta was now “reaping the fruit of the seeds which Joseph Muscat planted”.

Fenech Adami was taking questions after speaking at a PN press conference focussing on criminality.

PN MP Robert Cutajar also criticised the government for taking local law enforcement out of the hands of councils. “The government has abandoned law enforcement on a local level,” Cutajar charged.

Government captured the army and police

MEP candidate Dione Borg accused the government of “capturing the police force and the army” by putting its own people in charge.

“All that is happening is the fault of the government’s political manoeuvres, through which it sought to have absolute power by controlling all the important institutions,” Borg insisted.

“It did this when it appointed a Police Commissioner who is there to serve the government, not society. And it did the same with the armed forces – when the time came to promote the most professional and efficient people who could guarantee security, the government instead acted in a partisan way [when it dished out promotions],” he said.

Borg insisted the PN had reason to be worried about crime, as are the people.