Police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit yesterday revealed he had checked the phones of the Home Affairs Ministry’s chief of staff to establish the truth behind an allegation that calls were exchanged between the ministry and a well-known criminal.
He was answering questions from Times of Malta after a data protection investigation established he had not requested any information from mobile service providers.
“All I had to establish was who called who first. I asked (chief of staff Silvio) Scerri for his mobile and work telephone and he immediately obliged. People who have nothing to hide usually don’t give the police any problems,” he said.
Data Protection Commissioner Joseph Ebejer ruled that the police had not breached the law since it did not request information from service providers.
The probe was connected to a case in which a man was wrongly accused of committing a hold-up.
The affair goes back to last August when the PN claimed that Mr Scerri had used Joseph Attard, a criminal known as Iz-Zambi, as a go-between to speak to Darryl Luke Borg before the latter appeared in front of the Police Board. Mr Borg had been wrongly accused of a hold-up and the board was looking into the case.
Mr Zammit later declared on TV that “call logs” confirmed Mr Scerri had not made contact with Mr Attard but it was Mr Borg who had contacted Mr Scerri.
When asked at the time on what legal basis the logs were furnished, the police’s communications office had cited a number of legal articles related to the corruption of witnesses which it said justified a police request for call profiles in terms of the Data Protection Act.
Opposition spokesman for Home Affairs Jason Azzopardi had then asked the Data Protection Commissioner to investigate if there had been a breach of privacy in the way the Police Commissioner obtained the information.
Mr Ebejer looked into communications between Mr Scerri, Mr Borg, his mother Jane and Mr Attard.
He noted that had the police actually made the request to the mobile service providers, this would have been illegal as the crimes being investigated did not justify such a request.
Yesterday Dr Azzopardi said Mr Ebejer’s findings contradicted Mr Zammit’s declaration about the logs.
“This is an indictment of crass incompetence by the police who refer to articles of the law that do not apply,” Dr Azzopardi said as he insisted that Mr Zammit, Home Affairs Minister Manuel Mallia and Prime Minister Joseph Muscat shoulder political responsibility for this “mess”.
But in a statement later in the evening, the police said Dr Azzopardi’s argument was “legally and factually baseless” as the police had always said it had a call log in hand but had never said it had requested information from service providers.
Yesterday Mr Zammit again pointed out this distinction in his comments to this newspaper.
When it was pointed out to him that call logs can usually be deleted and altered in one way or another, Mr Zammit replied that it was easy to see that items had been deleted.
“Believe me, you’ll know if something is deleted. All you have to know is how to use the equipment. Programmes are downloadable from the internet. You just have to know how to go about it.”
Asked on the basis of what law he had asked to analyse Mr Scerri’s phones, Mr Zammit explained that the police have the power to request a person to hand over any evidence they possessed.
Answering another question on why he had invoked the Data Protection Act in his statement if he had not asked for call profiles according to this Act, Mr Zammit said he was simply explaining procedure.