In an impassioned plea to jurors lasting four hours, the prosecution in the warden murder trial yesterday drove a stake through the defence’s arguments, saying witnesses and forensic evidence both backed the charge that the accused had commissioned the killing.

Lawyer Lara Lanfranco, from the Attorney General’s Office, said bus driver Ġanni Attard, 64, who denies murdering 47-year-old Fortunata Spiteri nine years ago, was the mastermind behind the killing.

The lawyer punched holes in the defence’s premise that Mr Attard’s admission made in a statement to the police was merely an explanation of how he just happened to be a witness to the murder without actually taking part. Three other people had pointed a finger at the accused and their statements were corroborated by forensic evidence, she said.

The three people – Benny Attard, his sister Maria and their friend Giuseppe Farrugia – had told the police the accused was the person who commissioned the murder in Għarb on August 10, 2001.

Following his admission of involvement, Benny Attard was jailed for 30 years last year and Mr Farrugia died during proceedings. Ms Attard has never been charged.

All three had told the police that, on the night of the murder, the accused turned up at their house and they all went to look for Mrs Spiteri. However, it was the accused who wanted her dead over something as senseless as too many parking tickets, said Dr Lanfranco.

The accused was lying when he said he just happened to give the other three a lift and they had unwittingly placed him in the middle of a murder, she argued.

She told the jurors to imagine the terror the “poor woman” must have gone through seeing two men, Benny Attard and the accused, approach her on a dark road, one of them wearing a glow-in-the-dark mask similar to that used in the film Scream, and then set upon her in the way they did. Imagine her lying on the road and then getting up to get to her car, fighting for her life, starting the engine but then passing out because it was too late, the injuries too serious.

“There you have it, the author,” she said loudly as the accused shook his head in the dock.

She honed in on the fact that the accused in his statement to the police had adamantly denied he was the person to pick up the three others just before the murder took place. Why did the accused fiercely deny such a fact? The reason, she said, was that three other people were saying the exact opposite. He had wanted to “eliminate” the warden and his specific intention was to murder her, she held.

Mr Justice Michael Mallia is expected to address the jurors this morning after which they are likely to retire to deliberate.