A year has passed since Daphne Caruana Galizia’s brutal assassination. But the bomb who killed our Maltese colleague did not silence her investigations.
Forbidden Stories gathered 45 journalists from 15 countries to pick up Daphne’s work where she left it. Six month after its first publications, the Daphne Project makes new revelations.
All these stories are Daphne’s legacy and would not have been possible without her fearless reporting.
The tiny island of Malta is a strategic spot in the Mediterranean Sea for organized crime to secretly operate their smuggling networks. The Daphne Project delved into the darkest parts of Malta to track down the vessels hiding in their hatch fuel, cigarettes and drugs that are flooding the European market.
The Daphne Project is also committed to investigate the assassination of Daphne, in search of the masterminds the Maltese authorities have so far failed to arrest. One year after the murder, several leads are not pursued. According to the Daphne Project’s information , the police has so far interviewed none of the politicians Daphne was writing about. The Daphne Project now reveals new potential connections between the Maltese Economy minister Christian Cardona and one of the suspects arrested for Daphne’s murder.
Creating of the platform Forbidden Stories has been inspired by similar initiatives. In 1976 the American journalist Don Bolles was killed when his car exploded in Phoenix, Arizona. In the days that followed, Investigative Reporters & Editors brought together 38 journalists from around the US to finish the investigation that the Arizona Republic journalist had started.
In 2015, when the investigative journalist Khadija Ismayilova was locked up in Azerbaijan, a dozen colleagues from the Organised Crime Corruption Reporting Project also pursued her investigation into the corruption and tax evasion of the ruling family in Baku.
Just as courageous were the journalists from the Brazilian nonprofit organisation, ABRAJI, who carried on the work started by the reporter Tim Lopez, who was burned alive in 2002 by drug traffickers in a favela in Rio de Janeiro.