A restaurateur yesterday told a court how he was relentlessly interrogated and spent 46 hours in a police cell after the main witness in a case against an alleged leader of a criminal gang accused him of being a drug trafficker.
The alleged crime boss, lawyer and former police inspector David Gatt, used to frequent a restaurant owned by Raymond Abela and the two became friends. Any involvement in drugs was yesterday flatly denied by Mr Abela.
The man making the allegation, Police Constable Mario Portelli, claimed that when he went to dine at the restaurant in Xemxija with Dr Gatt, Mr Abela kissed Dr Gatt’s hand, spoke in Italian and handed him a load of free drugs. As Mr Abela described the allegations, Dr Gatt sat in the dock and chuckled.
Dr Gatt is charged with planning a string of hold-ups.
He is accused, among other things, of involvement in the attempted hold-up of the HSBC headquarters in June 2010 and the hold-up on a jeweller in Attard in November of the same year, both of which were foiled.
Taking the witness stand, Mr Abela said that, just before last Christmas, he received a call from his daughter at the restaurant saying the police were looking for drugs.
He went straight there. The police did not find anything and asked to search his home. He had no problem with that and, again, the search proved negative, he said.
Three months later, while he was preparing for a party, a police sergeant asked him to go to police headquarters. Unexpectedly, he was held there for 46 hours and interrogated relentlessly, he told the court.
Police Inspector Chris Pullicino first asked him about a murder and showed him photos but he did not know anything about it and certainly did not know the people in the photographs.
He was then questioned about the allegations PC Portelli made about him, about giving drugs to Dr Gatt, and he flatly denied them.
The police tried pressuring him to say something against Dr Gatt but he had nothing to say, he added.
When questioned further about the allegations by defence lawyer Joe Giglio, Mr Abela said that PC Portelli was “a liar from A to Z”.
The case continues.