13 acquitted of Facebook threats over Ghajn Tuffieha cat-killing incident

13 people who posted angry Facebook comments about the killing of a cat at Ghajn Tuffieha Bay last July have been cleared of threatening the owner of a restaurant in the area.  

The case relates to an incident in which a girl had witnessed a man beating a stray cat to death. The girl took to Facebook to say that the killer had been present at the nearby Apple’s Eye restaurant together with an elderly woman and a young girl.

This led many to arrive at the conclusion that it was the family which owned the restaurant who had killed the feline. A barrage of Facebook abuse followed and was reported to the police, with 13 people eventually being arraigned.    

They were eventually charged with making threats and misuse of electronic telecommunications equipment.

The police had investigated the comments and Inspector Spiridione Zammit charged the defendants with making threats against the family in August 2018.

In separate judgments handed down today, Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech explained that there were a number of errors committed during the police investigation into the case, amongst them the fact that the persons arraigned had been asked to go to the police station to be charged, a practise criticised by the court.

The court had also noted that police requests for information sent to Facebook had been made under the premise that it dealt with serious crime under the Criminal Code, not defamation on social media under the Media and Defamation Act.

The court explained that for words to be taken as threats, the prospect of harm must be real and the victim must be convinced that the person making the statement is capable of carrying out the threat.

In addition, the court ruled that the prosecution’s evidence consisted solely of inadmissible hearsay as no representatives of service providers or Facebook were summoned to testify.

“In these proceedings, the prosecution relied exclusively on information which they had received from Facebook and investigations on open sources and with local service providers…It is being underlined that [this evidence] amounts only to hearsay and is therefore inadmissible.”

The accused were all acquitted.

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