Police minister on Valletta protests: ‘PN wants to take us back to 1980s violence’

Home affairs minister Michael Farrugia put up a scathing attack on the Nationalist opposition, implicating them in “seven years of constant attacks on the country’s institutions” as Malta reels from the revelations on the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation.

Farrugia, under whose remit falls the Maltese police, accused the Nationalist Party of being mired in corruption and violence, during a debate in the House of Representatives on the developments in the Caruana Galizia investigation.

“The PN is only interested in seeing that decisions go their way, otherwise it’s never OK… if the country is taken back to where we once was, the Opposition will be to blame. ‘Civil society’ is the PN, they are part of that group. If they have problems between them, they should not put their problems on us: the people voted for this government to lead, and we will continue to lead.”

Farrugia also defended the prime minister’s resolve in seeing “no stone unturned” in the murder investigation of Daphne Caruana Galizia, having allowed the FBI and the Dutch police to assist in the investigation.

“The Opposition wanted us to speed up the process and arraign people without any proof,” Farrugia charged.

“And who calls out for corruption? The same MPs here who were proven by the Auditor General multiple times that they themselves have been part of the corruption… the Opposition leader, who cries his crocodile tears for whom he called ‘just some blogger’…  it is an honour for me as ministers of national security, to see this case coming to a close.”

But Farrugia accused Nationalist MPs of instigating protestors, and said that they would have to answer for instigating any violence.

“We have an obligation to the protection of the state… the people instigating the protests will go down in history as having done their best to repeat what happened in the 1970s and 1980s. They throw the stone and then hide their hand.”