Libyan police cars in Valletta last Saturday at midnight

Last Saturday at midnight two of these cars were parked on Merchants Street in Valletta.

I don’t read Arabic, but they’ve got lights on top which are covered in dustbin liners, and an Arabic-speaking reader has just confirmed that the word on the front means Police and that the number plate is Libyan.

The woman who took this photograph was accosted by a Maltese security man who asked her whether she had taken any photographs of the cars. She said that she hadn’t, and got chatting to him (we ladies, you just have to love the way we do it).

He told her that he had been put there specifically to stop people taking pictures of the cars because some meeting between Libyan officials and the Maltese government was taking place right then.

But they might have been used for a film meant to be set in Libya. The weird thing is that we are in a situation now where you never know because there are all kinds of things with all sorts of people going on beneath the surface.