Neville Gafà to be charged over threats to Italian journalist

Neville Gafà, the man who had been tasked by the Muscat administration with stemming the flow of migrants and refugees coming to Malta through Libya will be charged with threatening an Italian journalist.

MaltaToday had previously reported that he had been questioned by police over a tweet aimed at intimidating Italian journalist Nello Scavo. “Stop your dirty business. If not we will be stopping you,” Gafà had tweeted on June 27.

READ MORE : Gafà, the social media provocateur, weaponises Labour's immigration problem

On his Facebook page this afternoon, Gafà, a former person of trust in OPM, and who served as an unofficial envoy to Libya on matters of migration, claimed to have just been informed by the authorities that, after an investigation, he would be arraigned in court on charges of threatening the Italian journalist. Gafà protested his innocence in the post, saying that he had no intention of threatening Scavo, “more so publicly on social media.”

He claimed that in the past few weeks, great pressure was brought to bear on the Maltese authorities to proceed against him, naming “some of” the international organisations he blames for this.

The organisations singled out by Gafà include the Italian embassy in Malta, ARTICLE 19, European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF), European Federation of Journalists (EFJ), Free Press Unlimited, IFEX, International Press Institute (IPI), Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, Transeuropa (OBCT), PEN International, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Scottish PEN.