Yorgen Fenech accuses police of 'destroying exculpatory evidence' in Caruana Galizia murder case

Yorgen Fenech has filed a judicial protest against the police accusing them of destroying exculpatory evidence and requesting he be given a copy of all materials obtained as part of the investigation into the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.

This is his tenth such request. Fenech said the evidence is necessary for his defence.

Fenech’s lawyers, Gianluca Caruana Curran, Marion Camilleri and Charles Mercieca, insisted that the man indicted for the murder had a right to a fair hearing, which included the disclosure of all the evidence against him.

In the judicial protest, the lawyers claim that over Fenech’s 10-day interrogation, they had made several requests for disclosure and had been given four recordings of conversations between Fenech and self-confessed middleman Melvin Theuma.

They had said that they were aware that there were more recordings than that and requested that these, too, be disclosed. "The police refused to do so, and today it has emerged that [Fenech] was right: at the time, the police had over 200 recordings available."

After his arraignment, Fenech’s legal team had made at least ten requests for the disclosure of the evidence in the hands of the police, both in general as well as for specific phone interceptions and statements or declarations made by third parties with regards to the murder.

According to the defence, the police had evidence “which could prove Fenech’s innocence, and rather that he never wanted, sought, ordered or paid for the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia.” They alleged that the police had disposed of some evidence in order to be able to claim that it was no longer in the police’s possession instead of passing it on to the defence.

Insisting that this breached Fenech’s fundamental rights as enshrined in the Constitution, the European Convention, the Criminal Code and EU directives, the lawyers called upon the Commissioner of Police to “immediately inform him of the list of all material obtained in the murder investigation and to give him access to the aforementioned material, necessary for his defence at law.”