Judge orders police to reveal what Keith Schembri data it holds

A judge has ordered the Police Commissioner to declare what data pertaining to Keith Schembri’s mobile phone is in the police’s possession and Yorgen Fenech’s lawyers to declare what they want to exhibit as evidence from it.

Judge Lawrence Mintoff made the order in a decree handed down this afternoon as he presided a Constitutional case where Fenech is requesting the removal of the lead police investigator into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia from the case.

The judge said the declaration by the defendant in his 3 August application that Keith Schembri’s phone “appears to contain information which could confirm that which the plaintiff is claiming,” was not enough for the court, which wanted to know what the information was needed for. 

The court noted that the Commissioner of Police’s testimony in the case seemed to indicate that there was more data to be analysed from the mobile extraction and said that the Commissioner who should have brought this to the attention of the court. It, therefore, ordered him to declare, within ten days, what data from Keith Schembri‘s phone is in the police’s possession, what type of data it is, how and when it ended up in the police’s hands and to what time it refers.

“It is not enough that the possibility that the mobile phone in question contains the information which would confirm that which the applicant says in his application. The court opines that it is the applicant himself who should specify a priori what certain and exact evidence he wants to exhibit through the extraction and the point of that evidence.”

The court ordered Fenech to say which specific extractions he wants to exhibit as evidence and how they confirm what he is saying. He was given ten days to do so through a sworn note in the acts of the case, notified to the other parties.