Karin Grech
Edwin Grech wrote about the terrible story of his daughter Karin’s murder 34 years ago, in The Sunday Times the day before yesterday, and wondered aloud once again why there was never any progress in the police investigations.
A report on what he wrote was carried again in The Times yesterday. Professor Grech said:
“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.
I find it strange that both Professor Grech and The Times make it sound as though there is a Nationalist Party plot or Nationalist government pressure to prevent the police from investigating this case.
The suggestion, which is implied, cannot be more absurd. To my mind the most disturbing aspect of this case – beyond the girl’s death and her parents’ severe and life-destroying distress – is that the investigations were, for an entire decade after Karin’s murder, in the hands of a police force which was completely controlled by the Labour Party/government. There was no separation of powers at the time.
Karin was killed in the late 1970s, when her father was working as a strike-breaker at the state general hospital after Dom Mintoff went to war with doctors there and locked them out, and then rounded on the medical students. The Nationalist Party came to power and began sorting out what it could of the police force and instituting the separation of powers in 1987. For 10 years, the investigation was in the hands of disgraced Labour police commissioner Lorry Pullicino et al.
Professor Grech has said and written a great deal about clues and information he gave to the police, or which others gave to the police. But the way I see it, one of the biggest clues of all is the way the Labour Party-controlled police force sat on things and appears to have held back. This when ‘one of their own’ had been murdered. This when they roughed people up, raided their homes and even murdered one person at the Police HQ lock-up during interrogation or arrested them for nothing at all.
The question Professor Grech should be asking, and he probably does so in private though I have never heard/read him do so in public where he remains a loyal supporter of the Labour Party, is why that Labour Party should have felt the need to drag its heels on the investigation into his daughter’s murder for an entire decade.
Even if he thinks a PN ‘lawyer politician with offices in central Malta’ – as he explains it – was somehow involved in allowing medical students to use those offices to hatch and execute their plot to kill him, killing his daughter instead, he should still ask that question.
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I haven’t read what Dr. Grech said, and I would like to know whether he said “he THINKS a PN Lawyer politician etc or was it “he KNOWS etc etc.”
If it is the latter shouldn’t he come out with names?
Does he know who the medical students were?
He should come out with the names in the newspapers, if as he says no action was taken by the authorities.
What is keeping him from coming up with names?
[Daphne – The libel laws, Silvio, obviously.]
I think he owes it to his daughter that these criminals are brought to justice, whoever they are.
Not only should they be exposed but so should those who covered up for them, if anyone did so.
Libel laws. It seems like a very flimsy excuse.
A man whose daughter was murdered in such a horrific manner does not baulk at libel laws. I think the real reason is that he’s as confused as we are about the likely identity of the killer or killers.
[Daphne – I don’t mean Professor Grech, H. P. I mean the newspapers. THEY would baulk at the libel laws, and they are the ones responsible at law when publishing any such allegation.]
Hang on a minute. Are we saying he has the names, has given them to the newspapers, but the newspapers refuse to publish them? It makes no sense at all. All he needs to do is phone in on a radio programme. Or publish on the internet. Or spray-paint them on a wall or something.
Up to this day, I am mystified at how this case was not solved before 1987 when evidence was still relatively fresh and as was rightly pointed out earlier on , there was no separation of powers at the time.
Did anyone ever make any checks on those involved in the ORIGINAL investigation of the murder to see who, if any, may have had close relatives amongst the possible suspects referred to specifically by the Grech family?
Exactly my thoughts. We must remember that at the time there was no separation of the police force and the government, something which was reversed completely in 1987.
Therefore, if Labour really wanted to unearth the truth behind this unfortunate episode, they had TEN WHOLE YEARS to do it.
I’m pretty sure that if Professor Grech sits down and stops wondering aloud to reach an unbiased conclusion, he will realise the above. I’m pretty sure that one day he will be shocked to learn that all his thoughts and conclusions were completely incorrect.
It is always very convenient to put the blame on PN and completely obliterate those 10 years. I too would be very glad that the truth will be uncovered but not if one is already biased from the start and has already reached conclusions.
http://maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/national/Police-report-government-whip-for-obstruction-of-justice-20120416
The usual anti government comments by Malta Today make the incredible assumption that it is the police who are telling the truth.
Having said that the PN should sideline all the troublemakers. It cannot afford to be held responsible for the actions of individuals who don’t behave decently.
The gratuitous remarks made towards the end of that article are nauseating.
More “unbiased” journalism , this time from Balzan’s stables.
http://5pwn.com/this-popped-up-on-my-news-feed-yesterday.html …. This may be true in Malta too!
Were not the final-year and third year medical students ALREADY in the UK sitting for their final exams or continuing their studies LONG BEFORE Prof. Grech returned to Malta with his family? How could any of them have been involved in a conspiracy plot directed specifically at him in Malta?
During the Mintoff years embarkation cards had to be filled in when travelling to or from Malta. All that the Mintoff police had to do at the time of the tragedy was to check who of Prof Grech’s suspects were in Malta in the weeks preceeding that tragic Christmas and thus narrow considerably the list of suspects.
The Mintoff police and forensic experts had the whole of ten years to do so and thus solve the crime WHY DID’NT THEY? That is what people have been asking ever since.
Incidentally, one does not have to be a forensic expert to know that missing fingers are a recognizable trademark of carpenters AS WELL AS of those involved in the fire-works/ explosives industry.
Somewhere I read that Mrs Edwin Grech blamed someone else for the murder of her daughter, not from the PN but from the same MLP ranks. Or am I dreaming?
[Daphne – http://www.independent.com.mt/news2.asp?artid=65423 ]
I think his remarks were motivated by the pain the family still feels and the lack of closure.
I was more concerned with Helena Dalli’s suggestion that the PN planted mercenaries within the Police force and the MLP :http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20120416/opinion/To-lose-or-win-elections.415674
This re-writing of history is really worrying. The sooner something is done about it, the better.
Professor Edwin Grech had plenty of time and plenty of political clout to see to it that the police investigations were carried out with due diligence at that appropriate time when he was an MLP member of parliament in Mintoff’s government for ten whole years after that murder.
In whose interest were those investigations not intensively carried out there and then, when they had the greatest chance of success? Why expect miracles now?
When I was the victim of political violence during Mintoff’s time I knew why serious police investigations were not carried out against known criminals, and I said so at the time.
It was because the criminals known both to me and to the police had important MLP connections. But I had no political clout to see that justice would be done. Prof. Edwin Grech had that clout.
Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. That should have been the guiding principle, but it wasn’t. We were not the only ones to suffer that kind of injustice. At least Prof. Edwin’s family seems to have been generously compensated even though money can never redress such injustices.
Professor Grech’s friends in government at the time of this tragedy were in the best position to press the police to solve the case as soon as possible. Why did they not do so?
After all, Prof Grech left a high position abroad in order to save the government’s bacon after it had locked out Maltese doctors and caused most to seek their livelihood out of the country.
Now, 34 years later, he claims he has evidence which the police never investigated. If I am not mistaken, soon after the programme ‘Evidenza’ mentioned in Prof Grech’s letter, Commissioner John Rizzo held a press conference at which time he went through Paul Chetcuti Caruana’s similar claims and stated, one by one, how such evidence was examined in detail but without positive results.
I watched the programme ‘Evidenza’ and I found one particular person quite unconvincing, to put it mildly. Also the fact that two identical letter bombs were made by the same person, using the same components and one goes off but the other did not is suspicious and no satisfactory explanation was forthcoming.
One understands Prof Grech and his family’s distress, but on the other hand it is also not right to accuse the police and other investigators of having their work impaired by ‘an influential hidden hand’.
Not naming this influential hidden hand to the police is primarily of great disservice to Prof Grech himself and his family. Not naming the ‘Mosta lawyer who allowed med students to hold their meetings in his office’ cannot prevent some simple investigation by the general public and discovering who the lawyers practicing in Mosta at that time, were.
The list could not have been too long and recognizing names could reduce the number further by political affiliation, etc. Any one of the 119 med students could easily identify the name of the lawyer, who, after all, presumably, is not one of the suspects.
Not only did the MLP government have ten years to solve that murder if it wanted to, but it also had a subservient police force that was not adverse to adopt severe torture methods to acheive its ends!
Professor Edwin Grech was a prominent member of the MLP parliamentary group responsible for that hideous set up. THAT was the best time to solve that crime, one way or another.