Police investigated CCTV footage over alleged sighting of Cardona with murder suspect

Maltese investigators collected CCTV footage from the Siggiewi neighbourhood where economy minister Chris Cardona had been allegedly witnessed in conversation with a murder suspect, when the Caruana Galizia family reported the information back in December 2017.

Cardona was alleged to have been witnessed speaking to Alfred Degiorgio ‘il-Fulu’ at the Ferdinand Bar before and after the 16 October assassination of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in a horrific car bomb outside her Bidnija home.

The claim was made by a witness, a regular at the bar, who later told journalists from The Daphne Project that he saw Cardona one day in November, speaking to Degiorgio sometime between 4.30pm and 6.15pm.

MaltaToday is informed that CCTV evidence from the periods in question was collected by police investigators after family members told Magistrate Anthony Vella of the witness’s claims.

But this newspaper is informed that the inconclusive CCTV footage was not included in the magistrate’s inquiry documents after it produced no reliable proof of the minister’s alleged rendezvous with the murder suspect.

Degiorgio was charged in December with the car-bomb murder together with his brother George Degiorgio ‘ic-Ciniz’, and Vincent Muscat ‘il-Kohhu’, but police are still investigating the case in a bid to find the alleged mastermind behind the journalist’s assassination.

According to the witness at Ferdinand Bar, Cardona was seen speaking to Degiorgio for some time and at one point, he spotted them walking outside together. This was the only time he had seen the two together, the eyewitness said. The bar owner had declined to comment with the media on the movements of any of his clients.

Cardona had only categorically denied having met the suspect after voluntarily submitting himself for questioning days after The Daphne Project published a recording of the alleged witness’s claims. The witness was presented to The Daphne Project by a Nationalist MP. Cardona denied having ever met the accused, or that he had ever frequented the bar in the weekends. However, he said he did not “exclude the possibility that there might have been any of the suspects at the bar at the same time he had been there”.

The husband of the late journalist has, however, insisted that political interests were blocking the police investigation, fearing that the mastermind might never be brought to justice. “It is clear to us that the three men arraigned so far are simply contractors commissioned by a third party,” Peter Caruana Galizia had said in an interview. “My sons and I are not convinced that our government really wants to establish who sent them, for fear such persons are, in fact, very close to our government. For this reason we may never know the truth.”