Journalist Leading Panama Papers Investigation Killed by Car Bomb Explosion

(ANTIMEDIA) Malta — Following Monday’s car bomb murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist leading the Panama Papers investigation into corruption within the government of Malta, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has offered a hefty reward to anyone with information about the killing.

“Outraged to hear that Maltese investigative journalist+blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia has been murdered this afternoon not far from her home with a car bomb,” Assange wrote on Twitter Monday night. “I issue a €20k reward for information leading to the conviction of her killers.”

Galizia, who POLITICO recently referred to as a “one-woman WikiLeaks,” had been a thorn in the side of the Maltese government for the last two years. The journalist used information from the Panama Papers — the cache of 11.5 million internal documents from offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca that were leaked in 2015 — to expose corruption within Malta’s political class, as the Guardian highlighted Monday:

“Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.”

Galizia, who was 53 and leaves behind a husband and three sons, published her final blog post barely half an hour before her death. One of the reporter’s sons, Matthew, took to Facebook following the murder, saying she was killed because of her refusal to back down:

“My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists. But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so.”

Continuing, Matthew wrote that in the fight against corruption, “the last person left standing is often a journalist” which, ultimately makes them “the first person left dead.”

Matthew, who is also a journalist, said his mother’s death “is not tragic,” but rather that she was a casualty of war:

“Tragic is someone being run over by a bus. When there is blood and fire all around you, that’s war. We are a people at war against the state and organised crime, which have become indistinguishable.”

Creative Commons / Anti-Media / Report a typo