Why is the Nationalist Party newsroom covering the murder of a criminal in this inappropriate fashion?

This wasn’t a “tragedy”. This was a criminal killed by a car bomb. A tragedy would be, for example, an avalanche burying a village, or a coachload of schoolchildren going over a precipice.

Sympathetic coverage and attempts at pulling at heartstrings are, in a situation like this, totally not on. They are especially unacceptable for any media owned by either of the political parties.

One of the responsibilities of politicians is to work together to crack down on the exponential growth of criminality, most of it revolving around smuggling of people, drugs, cigarettes (both real and counterfeit), diesel and weapons. So the last thing they should be doing is interviewing the children of criminals for sob-stories which they hope will increase readership. If they want a story that will increase readership, they can start by investigating the activities in which this man was involved.

Instead, the politicians go on about Malta being a hub for this and a hub for that. Malta is indeed a hub and has been for years. It is a hub for smuggling cigarettes, drugs, fuel, people and weapons into Europe. The smuggling business has grown so big that the smugglers have started killing each other and their henchmen in turf wars and vengeance attacks.

Crime can’t happen on this scale unless there are people in key positions in authority – not necessarily elected politicians but I’d say those too – who can help make it possible.

And the sooner people wake up to the scale of what’s going on, the better. One big driver of the Maltese economy is proceeds from crime. Much of it is put into bricks and mortar.