Columnist describes far-right leader, Lowell as religion to followers

Columnist Daphne Caruana Galizia yesterday described far-right leader Norman Lowell as a religion to his followers on the Viva Malta website.

Ms Caruana Galizia was cross examined in a libel case instituted by website moderator Arlette Baldacchino who objected to an article which appeared in The Malta Independent on Sunday in 2006 titled What Is A Nice Girl Like That Doing There?

Ms Caruana Galizia said she was "shocked" to see Ms Baldacchino, who at school was a sweet girl and good natured, defending Mr Lowell and moderating the website Viva Malta.

She added that Ms Baldacchino had moderated the website under the pseudonym Etoile Noir and accompanied Mr Lowell during public meetings and outside the law courts during court proceedings during which he was convicted of inciting racial hatred in March 2008.

Ms Caruana Galizia described the comments on the group's website as "harsh, cruel and frightening".

Ms Baldacchinos' lawyer, Claire Bonello, challenged this point, asking whether she knew that the website had been hacked and that comments were changed, to which Ms Caruana Galizia said she did not.

She insisted that the moderator should know whether there was anything wrong with the website, adding that nobody was crazy enough to hack a website to change comments. Hackers did it to crash the site, she said.

Asked to substantiate the claim that people on the website were followers of Mr Lowell, Ms Caruana Galizia said the website gave prominence to his philosophy, adding that if Mr Lowell did not exist, the site would not exist either.

The lawyer then presented statistics about comments posted on the website, pointing out that a man who used the pseudonym Marco Polo left 14,000 posts, Ms Baldacchino 9,000 and Mr Lowell's followers 4,000.

But Ms Caruana Galizia insisted that she still thought Mr Lowell was a dominant presence on the site because "Lowell is a religion for them". She also pointed out that the man with the pseudonym Marco Polo had been investigated about an arson attack on her house in 2006 but nobody had been charged.

The case was put off to October.

Lawyer Peter Fenech appeared for Ms Caruana Galizia and Noel Grima, former editor of The Malta Independent on Sunday.