AG accused of double standards in Baron Sant Cassia murder case

Lawyers for an intellectually disabled man who is due to go on trial next month for the 1988 murder of Baron Francis Sant Cassia, accuse the Attorney General of double standards, questioning why a nolle prosequi has not been issued in his case

Castello Zammitello in the outskirts of Mgarr, where Baron Francis Sant Cassia was murdered in October 1988
Castello Zammitello in the outskirts of Mgarr, where Baron Francis Sant Cassia was murdered in October 1988

Lawyers for an intellectually disabled man who is due to go on trial next month for the 1988 murder of Baron Francis Sant Cassia, have accused the Attorney General of double standards, questioning why a nolle prosequi has not been issued in his case.

Baron Sant Cassia was shot dead at point-blank range on the grounds of his house, Castello Zammitello, in Mġarr in 1988.

In 2006, 68-year-old Carmel Camilleri was charged with the wilful homicide of the baron, accused of carrying out the murder on the instructions of a third party.

Police had received information indicating Camilleri to have been the gunman while investigating another case in 2004. Camilleri, from Mosta, was alleged to have been paid a sum of money to carry out the assassination. He was 33-years-old at the time of the murder, but a court-appointed psychiatrist had subsequently reported that Camilleri had an IQ of around 50 and a mental age of between nine and 12 years old.

After his arrest, Camilleri spent two years in preventive custody before being granted bail, which has remained his position for the past 17 years. The Attorney General had issued his bill of indictment in 2008.

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During this time, Camilleri’s physical and mental health had deteriorated to the point where he is now unable to communicate with his loved ones, his lawyers say. On January 27, two weeks before his trial was due to start, the Criminal Court had ordered him to be admitted to Mount Carmel hospital, after being informed that he was also unable to communicate with his lawyers.

This morning, Camilleri’s lawyers, Jason Azzopardi and Kris Busietta, filed a judicial protest, slamming the Attorney General for insisting on seeing this case through, “despite knowing that there is not even a crumb of evidence, direct or indirect, against the defendant in the acts of the proceedings.”

Despite there being only one possible outcome of this trial, said the lawyers, the AG had allowed the case to drag on for 17 years and was still adamant in refusing to issue an order not to prosecute - a nolle prosequi.

In addition to being an unjust application of the absolute discretion granted to the AG by the Criminal Code, the refusal also constituted discriminatory treatment in breach of his fundamental human rights, they argued.

It was pointed out that the AG had used a completely different metric when dealing with Pilatus Bank director Mehmet Tasli and bank official Antoniella Gauci, in whose regard the AG had issued a nolle prosequi - despite their prosecution being expressly recommended by the inquiring magistrate who had investigated the bank.

“So, where it is reasonably justified that a nolle prosequi is issued, the Attorney General is refusing. But when one reasonably should not have been issued, it was. And was issued in a very short timeframe, less than six months after [the AG] received the acts of the magisterial inquiry.”

This led Camilleri and his family to conclude that the AG was acting “in an abusive, irresponsible and discriminatory manner, to the detriment of Carmel Camilleri, who ended up an innocent victim.”

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