The verdict was delivered after eight hours of deliberation: the jurors voted 8 to 1 to acquit Fenech on both charges. In the packed courtroom, Fenech’s relatives shouted with joy, while Caruana Galizia’s family cried.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in October 2017: a bomb exploded near her car. She was 53 years old.
In 2022, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio were sentenced to 40 years in prison each for their role in the murder. In 2025, Robert Agius and Jamie Vella received life sentences for supplying the bomb.
Caruana Galizia was known for investigations into corruption, money laundering, and organized crime, which she published on the Running Commentary blog. She also took part in the Panama Papers investigation, which exposed offshore schemes and led to accusations against high-ranking officials in Malta.
At the trial, the jurors heard that Fenech allegedly wanted the journalist dead because she was about to reveal information about him. He denied all accusations and tried to shift responsibility onto Keith Schembri, the former chief of staff to Malta’s then prime minister Joseph Muscat; police told the court that Schembri had never been a suspect, and Schembri himself denied involvement in the murder. Fenech, one of Malta’s richest people, owned the company about which Caruana Galizia had written a few months before her death.
The murder sparked widespread outrage and protests in Malta, and Muscat resigned in January 2020 because of the political fallout from the case. Caruana Galizia’s family said that the institutional failures that allowed her to be killed have still not been addressed or reformed.
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