The hunters' federation yesterday launched a tirade against BirdLife, lamenting that Maltese tax payers were being forced to pay for the police protection of the organisation's president because of the conservation group's "intolerance" and "provocative" tactics.
The statement comes in the wake of last Sunday's suspected arson when three BirdLife volunteers had their cars burnt in Buskett.
Making specific reference to the police protection given to BirdLife's president Joseph Mangion, the federation said the fact that he needed protection was partly the conservation group's tactics of confrontation, citing as an example the bird watch camp held recently for foreign birders.
"Why did they incite foreign interference and confrontation last September and again intend to repeat the scenario comes this spring," the federation asked.
"Why did they parade a few 'personalities' with T-shirts bearing the logo 'Ban illegal spring hunting' when they know very well that spring hunting has always been legal to date?"
"It is a great pity that the Minister for Rural Affairs and the Environment failed to check their self-righteous arrogance."
Asked to comment, BirdLife's executive director Tolga Temuge simply made reference to the recent batch of posts on the federation's online forum that the conservation group brought to the attention of the police. BirdLife on Tuesday said the police had failed to inform it of the progress of their investigation into a report that the conservation group had filed last year flagging some posts as inciting violence.
In reply, the police said they had found no abusive material on the federation's forum in an investigation carried out last October. About 72 pages of postings, totalling 15,057 messages from 2,631 registered members were investigated, the police said.
When filing its original report last February, BirdLife had drawn the media's attention to posts such as that of someone nicknamed Malviz who wrote: "I'm sure that, like me, you other enthusiasts are prepared to do everything - so if need be, let's trigger off panic, let's fight, so we can show people that we too have rights".
How could the police claim publicly that there was no infringement of the Criminal Code, the Press Act and the Electronic Communications Act and that the hunters' federation has absolutely no responsibility, Mr Temuge insisted in reference to such posts.
The federation still felt vindicated by the police's statement and accused the conservation group of sustained lying. "It seems that BirdLife have become so much used to uttering falsehoods that they did not even consider the possibility that any of their statements could ever be proved false, this time around by the Malta Police Commissioner."
Questions sent to the police remained unanswered by the time of writing.