Shameful PR circus at the hospital morgue this morning

I received this comment at nine o’clock this morning.

Final preparations are being made at the Mater Dei Hospital mortuary right now for a PR circus with the corpses of the poor people who drowned and were brought to Malta by the Italian navy.

There are policemen, soldiers, and Maltese and international press representatives, including BBC News. The tent which Joseph Muscat used in the Labour Party’s general election campaign has been set up on the hospital helipad.

Those who are gathering at the circus venue include former Super One reporter Ramona Attard, communications coordinator at the Police and Army Ministry, still in the job despite the mess made with the Paul Sheehan shoot-out, dressed top to toe in black.

The prime minister’s cynicism knows no bounds. He struck a deal in which Italy would take the live migrants while Malta would take the corpses, and now he is using those corpses, which won’t have to be fed and housed, for publicity.

He was interviewed on RAI’s Porta a Porta and tried to portray Malta as one of the countries that really are bearing the burden of immigration from Africa, in the same league as Italy, Spain and Greece, and he was laughed off by an Italian politician.

Those migrants who did not make it died an undignified and truly terrible death by drowning after an arduous journey that took months, to escape the horrors in their own country. They fled in hope and ended up drowned in the Mediterranean. And now the Maltese continue to spit on their dignity even after their deaths.