I have been following the saga of Pierre Ellul’s Dear Dom. What concerns me most is the controversy which arose with its inclusion of the murder of my 15-year-old daughter Karin by a letter bomb sent to my residence on December 28, 1977, during the shameful doctors’ strike.
There is an influential hidden hand keeping these murders from being solved- Edwin Grech
It appears that Ellul was averse to the criticism of what one of the interviewees, his father-in-law (and former Nationalist MP and parliamentary secretary) Joe Psaila Savona, said about the doctors’ strike, namely that Karin’s murder had no political motive. He simply remarked that “one could still have opinions’’ (times ofmalta.com, April 2).
In my dictionary, opinions are beliefs or judgments that rest on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty. Nobody is denying Ellul this right. However since Psaila Savona never referred to the court sentence during the interview, this begs the question: why did he find it convenient, while he was talking about the doctors’ strike, to state that Karin Grech’s killing was not political?
If it was not political, why was Karin’s murder ever mentioned at all? Unless of course there was a hidden agenda.
Therefore let me remind Ellul and the public the Constitutional Court’s judgment of November 30, 2010, which accepted thatthe motive for this most heinous crime was one of a medical/political nature.
The court also decided that “by his refusal to give this case the same treatment of compensation as he did where crimes happened in other cases which were considered as the rendering of service to the government of Malta, the defendant (the Prime Minister) acted in a discriminatory manner towards the plaintiff in breach of Article 45 of the Constitution of Malta.”
The Attorney General on behalf of the Prime Minister appealed only on parts of the whole judgment.
The Appeal Court simply refused to consider the appeal made by the AG on behalf of the Prime Minister because he had already accepted part of the judgment by agreeing to pay compensation as decreed by the first court. Surely the AG must have known that this appeal, as presented, could not be upheld. There must be a catch here.
Such action by the AG on behalf of the government may have been intended to confuse the public at large into thinking that the Appeal Court’s judgment was somewhat inconclusive. On the contrary, the judgment of the first court as delivered stands.
In fact, I am more than pleased that the government decided to award the same level of compensation to Raymond Caruana’s family so as not to be seen discriminating against them as well.
Caruana’s was another politically-motivated murder which has not been solved because there is an influential hidden hand keeping these murders from being solved and justice done.
It is interesting to note here what Caruana’s brother Jimmy says: “Everybody kept lying in their accounts. People have always known who’s responsible, but nobody wanted to tell on others.” (The Sunday Times, April 11, 2011).
One cannot explain how the police were unable to solve any of these crimes. In my daughter’s case, they had always suspected that the murder was medically/politically related to the doctors’ strike, yet the criminal investigation was so amateurish and disjointed. I wonder why.
The most important group of students were never investigated, while politically-connected people were also never interrogated or investigated.
The forensic expert on the programme Evidenza on Net TV revealed that after 34 years the investigators are still seeking fingerprints and other clues from 119 suspects.
Another forensic official on the same programme believed and declared openly that this crime “can still be solved because there are clues which could still be important.” (In-Nazzjon, December 26, 2011).
I have personally provided extremely important information to the police which should have led them to solve the crime. They even failed to check the veracity of this information. This could easily have been done since it was obtained in another lawyer’s office, not to mention the unwillingness to properly conduct a serious investigation.
This information which I had passed on to the police was made public on several occasions. There was absolutely no reaction to this from any quarters, so I will briefly repeat it here.
During the doctors’ strike, when the Medical School, located in the grounds of St Luke’s Hospital, closed down, the Medical Students Association council started to meet in the legal offices of a well-known politician in central Malta, when these were not in use.
Also present at these meetings were MAM council members and a number of politically-associated people.
The plot of the parcel bombs was hatched in these offices by this group, which used the telephone directory to obtain my address and that of Paul Chetcuti Caruana. Envelopes and typewriters were also used.
A well-known criminal with experience in explosives was commissioned to prepare these explosive devices, naturally at a price and perhaps blackmail as well.
A very good carpenter (referred to in a Scotland Yard report which the police hold) was engaged to prepare the small wooden (beech wood) container with two narrow compartments in it, which held the battery and explosive, so well illustrated by the forensic expert on the Net TV programme.
This person was very well known to the lawyer-politician. The same person also used to allow the medical students and the other people to enter the legal office.
Another person carried and posted the parcel bombs, one in Sliema and the other in Mosta. This person is likely to have been the same carpenter.
As informed, this person must have had several missing or partly missing fingers, an occupational hazard often encountered among carpenters. This will explain why the palm prints on the envelopes were more prominent than the fingerprints.
Someone writing in The Times (January 25, 2012) commented that “you do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to come up with some concrete names”.
I hope the police and whoever else is involved in the investigation are listening.
Despite the above, I must congratulate Ellul for undertaking such a difficult, sensitive and delicate task of documenting on the big screen this part of our recent history.
This history belongs to all of us. Many of us lived through it and experienced the events illustrated in the film.
It is therefore important that the events documented must be discussed and projected in the context of the times in which they occurred.
Above all, I advise Ellul not to allow his work to be hijacked by any political group for propaganda purposes.