Dom Mintoff’s successor and his long-time private secretary are both unaware of claims that he had ever been violently threatened by his Libyan counterpart, as Labour MEP John Attard Montalto asserted.
Writing in The Times yesterday, Dr Attard Montalto – who had a long-standing friendship with the late Mr Mintoff – said the former Labour leader had told him about a threatening exchange with Muammar Gaddafi’s former number two, Abdesalam Jalloud.
Mr Mintoff was in Tripoli shortly after the 1980 standoff, when Libyan gunboats threatened to shoot at an oil platform drilling for Malta.
According to Dr Attard Montalto, Mr Mintoff described the meeting, which lasted several hours, as “the greatest fight” of his life.
“Jalloud shouted at Mintoff that even the waters in Malta’s Grand Harbour fell within Libyan waters. Mintoff gave as good as he got. I suspect Jalloud retorted by pulling out a gun or making direct physical threats,” Dr Attard Montalto wrote.
However, neither Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, Mr Mintoff’s chosen successor in 1984, nor his aide and confidant, Joe Camilleri, had any recollection of the incident.
Nor did they ever hear about another claim that Dr Attard Montalto said was made by Mr Mintoff, that the deposed Libyan leader once propositioned him to act as an intermediary in the purchase of a nuclear submarine.
Mr Camilleri, who served as Mr Mintoff’s private secretary between 1971 and 1977 and remained as Cabinet secretary till 1979, said he never heard anything about Col Gaddafi’s supposed proposal.
“I personally attended all the meetings Mintoff had with Gaddafi and with Jalloud and these things were never mentioned,” Mr Camilleri said when asked about the submarine claim.
The meeting with Mr Jalloud over the oil drilling incident would have happened after Mr Camilleri’s time at the Office of the Prime Minister. However, he had remained in touch with Mr Mintoff right till the very end and was even occasionally asked by il-Perit to help with his unpublished memoirs.
“I would have known,” Mr Camilleri said.
Dr Mifsud Bonnici, who had liaisons with the former Libyan Prime Minister Jalloud, also said he never came across information on either incident.
“I have no idea,” he said. “All I can say is that the relationship between Mintoff and Jalloud was not good and that Jalloud was very tough with us but Mintoff always overcame this through his relationship with Gaddafi,” Dr Mifsud Bonnici said.
“I cannot say that Jalloud was violent but I can say he was very tough with us. I spoke to him many times and came to agreements but he was tough.”
The 1980 gunboat incident happens to coincide with a period in which Mr Jalloud was out of government. He was Libyan Prime Minister until 1977 and, though he served in other government positions before he fell out with the former dictator in the mid-1990s, his influence waned significantly.
Dr Mifsud Bonnici pointed out that during the period before the 1980 incident, Mr Jalloud was not in the government.
“Jalloud at one point had cut himself off completely from the government. It’s not that him and Gaddafi had fallen out, but he was not at all active,” Dr Mifsud Bonnici said.
This is the second time in as many months that Dr Attard Montalto was faced with a puzzled reaction from politicians on his side of the fence following his revelations of private conversations with Mr Mintoff.
Last month, he claimed that Mr Mintoff had instructed him to make an offer to buy the Archbishop’s Curia with a view to relocating the party headquarters from Il-Maċina in Senglea to Floriana.
The revelation was made in a taped interview, which was shown on the TVM talk show Realtà which hosted Labour MPs Karmenu Vella and Marie Louise Coleiro, who both worked closely with Mr Mintoff. Both appeared sceptical.
Attempts to contact Dr Attard Montalto were unsuccessful.