Yana Mintoff’s boyfriend was stabbed FOUR TIMES in the abdomen

Dom Mintoff’s elderly daughter has been playing the martyr in court, and seems to be particularly keen to convince us that her boyfriend, 38, was riven by lust and sexual jealousy for this woman almost 30 years his senior. If she had claimed that he was seriously upset at the thought of losing the roof over his head and his status as a kept man, then she would have been more convincing.

A police officer testified, saying that he interviewed her at the Paola Health Centre, where she and her son had gone that night for the treatment of their “slight wounds” – shallow slashes to the left wrist and upper part of her chest, in her case, and a gash to the thigh in his.

By far the most important fact to emerge in court this morning was that Gheorghe Popa, the boyfriend, was stabbed four times in the abdomen and not just the once, as we had been led to believe. The police said in court that they found him hiding up a tree after they followed a trail of blood. He had four ‘grouped’ knife wounds in his abdomen and some of his intestines had spilled out.

Stabbing yourself in the abdomen once might just about be passed off as self-harm – but four times? The court was told, however, that the court-appointed expert has concluded it was Popa who drove the knife four times into his own abdomen.

Because the court expert has decided – unilaterally and substituting judge, jury, and due process of Yana Mintoff and Daniel Mainwaring – that Popa stabbed himself four times, neither of the two will be charged and prosecuted. This is unheard of. Court experts do not take decisions that substitute due process – their decisions are used as part of the evidence in that due process.

The very idea that Popa ran up to the roof of the house where he drove a meat knife into his abdomen four times and then jumped off the roof into a tree would be laughable were the thought that this is yet another hideous cover-up not so frightening.

I have no doubt that Popa was abusive, erratic and violent – there are many men like this – but if either Yana Mintoff or Daniel Mainwaring stabbed him repeatedly, then the matter should go to court and a jury decide whether it was justified or not, after they have heard all the evidence.