Witness says men accused of killing prostitution boss Rivas, looked 'panicked'

The three men charged over the fatal stabbing of a Romanian man in Paceville had looked and sounded panicked, according to the taxi driver who drove them home.

Josef Rivas, a suspected member of a Romanian organised crime ring, died at Mater Dei Hospital after being stabbed in Paceville on December 5, 2022.

Several witnesses gave evidence today, as the compilation of evidence against Rivas’ alleged assassins continued before Magistrate Nadine Lia.

Three Romanian men: Ilie Constantin, Ionut Iulian Tanase, and Dan-Andrei Tanase, were subsequently charged with his murder. They deny the charges.

Police officers from the Homicide Squad gave an account of their involvement in the investigation, amongst other things telling the court that they had spoken to several sex workers living in a Paceville apartment that had been indicated to the police as being potentially connected to the aggressors.

One of the women had told the officers that “a certain Andrei” had called and told her to leave the flat. She was arrested after police officers noticed that she was being evasive in her replies. A search of her flat returned items belonging to the accused men, amongst them a laptop belonging to Ionut Tanase.

READ ALSO: Paceville murder connected to dispute over organised crime prostitution ring, court told

An air ticket was one of the items recovered when police officers searched the Marsaskala flat which the murdered man had been renting under the assumed name Todica Liviu.

From the witness stand, another police officer said CCTV footage from Paceville showed the accused men stopping at the apartment mentioned by the sex workers, before getting into a taxi. Outside Tanase’s flat, the officer noticed what appeared to be blood droplets and so had called in forensic officers, who found more blood inside the apartment and a bloodstained hoodie in the garbage.

The driver of the taxi in question, a young Maltese man, also testified.

Prosecutor Darlene Grima from the Office of the Attorney General asked him about what had happened that night.

He had been called in by the police for questioning, he said.

“The police asked me what happened the day before. I didn’t know what they were talking about. They asked me basically, whether I had been in Paceville at a certain time the day before. I had only been doing this job for about a week. I had been near Blackbull when a Bolt order came in using a non-existent mobile number. The number didn’t work so I called them through the app and they told me to pick them up from near Burger King. They sounded a bit panicked.”

Near Paceville’s Burger King, two men had run up to his cab and climbed in. A third man joined them shortly after, he said.

Asked what nationality the men had been, the witness said he thought they might be Romanian from the language they were using. One of the men spoke to him in English, he said.

READ ALSO: Paceville murder victim was stabbed 28 times over prostitution profits

The court asked him what had made him think that the men were “panicky”.

“As soon as the second man came in, the first man shouted ‘drive drive drive!’ I got a bit scared. He was shouting at me.”

The English-speaking passenger gave him directions while he was driving, he said, adding that the route he had been given avoided having to drive through the road where the incident took place. “At one point they started talking in their language and I didn’t understand what they were saying. They received a phone call from a woman talking in the same language and she started screaming and crying,” said the witness.

The driver had dropped the passengers off in Swieqi, near a corner shop in Triq il-Keffa, he said.

The Magistrate asked the witness whether he had noticed the men to have been carrying something with them as they got into the car. “I only noticed that one of them was limping. I didn’t really see what they were carrying.”  The passengers had paid him €20 in cash, he said.

Cross-examined by lawyer Franco Debono, who suggested that the men were scared and wanted to flee the place, the witness replied “they were panicked, not afraid.”

The next witness was Tanasse’s landlord, who recognised the accused man in the courtroom as the tenant of one of the flats he rents out in Paceville. “Andrei had asked me for an apartment for his cousin in the same building,” he said, handing over the contract.

“He didn’t know how long his cousin needed to stay in Malta… before that, they had been living in another flat in Ross street, St. Julians, on a week-by-week basis.”

The last witness today was the murdered man’s landlord.

The witness told the court that he rents out an apartment in Marsaskala for short lets. On December 3 at noon, he had was notified about a short-notice booking through a website. At 3pm that same day he received a call from a woman informing him that his tenants would be arriving that same day.

The flat had been booked up till December 6, he said. But when he went to the flat on December 5, to check what time his guests would be leaving, they had informed him they would be leaving that very evening, he said.

“[The next day] I went to see the flat and noticed that they had left a mess, a disaster.” The witness noticed that a suitcase and a jacket had been left behind. He found a passport in one of the jacket’s pockets and recognised Rivas’ name from news reports.

“Obviously when I saw this, I had read on social media that there had been a murder. They had named him [the victim]. So, I called the police to tell them that I had found his suitcase and passport and they told me to go to the police station.” Forensic officers had then visited the apartment later that day.

The murdered man, Josef Rivas, 44, had been a person of interest to international intelligence services due to suspected ties to organised crime. The Malta Police Force had reportedly been working together with the UK and Romanian police forces on the investigation.

During the arraignment of the three men accused of the killing, Police Inspector Kurt Zahra had told the court that police investigations pointed to the murder having been the result of a dispute between rival organised crime syndicates working in the field of prostitution.

Lawyers Arthur Azzopardi, Franco Debono, Charmaine Cherret and Jacob Magri are representing the accused men.

The accused are being prosecuted by lawyers Darlene Grima and Kaylie Bonnett from the Attorney General’s office, along with police inspectors Kurt Zahra and Wayne Camilleri. Magistrate Nadine Lia is presiding over the case.