L-Atti tal-Inkjesta datata 19 ta' Novembru 2019, rigward skont it-Termini ta’ Referenza ta’ l- Inkjesta Pubblika dwar l- Assassinju ta’ Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Seduta miżmuma llum it-Tnejn 17 ta’ Frar 2020, fis-2:30 p.m. fit-Tieni Sular, Awla 20, il-Qorti.

Xhud Matthew Caruana Galizia riprodott, bil-lingwa Ingliza u bil-gurament tieghu jghid :

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Yes, tell us Matthew.

The Witness :

So as you said some of the blogpost from Glenn Bedingfield’s blog are online; but as he took his blog down a few months after my mother’s murder its very difficult to brows through them. There are 2 sites that are completely unrelated to Glenn Bedingfield and to anyone in this room. There are run by private companies and what they do is copy websites continuously and maintain archives of those websites. So what I have done is download every single one of those archived blogpost available from those 2 sites. The first is called “Way Back Machine”; and the other is another site called “archive.today”. And I’ve put them on disk. Now the reason I put them on disk and these CDs are annexed to this report on what I observed and also a description of what is contained in the CDs and Glenn Bedingfield’s blog and so on. So they are annexed to this report which I authored and which I am presenting.

The reason I put them on CDs is that it is very easy to separate them and it can be written over on like a pen-drive. So I’ll come back to what’s on them later. But in the report I just gave a short introduction to Glenn Bedingfield’s Blog and his campaign work..

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Did you tell us when it started?

The Witness :

So again, annexed to this report I provided a copy of what’s called the DNS history of the domain Glenn Bedingfield.com, and this is an accurate picture I mean a scientific timeline of the activity on his domain. It can’t be

contradicted. This information is publicly available; so it shows that the domain was first registered in 2003, and then there were several periods where it kind of laps the registration laps to Glenn Bedingfield forget to pay his bills or it could have been anything. But we see that the website was revived in December 2015, after a long period of dormancies since 2012. And then it was finally stopped in sometime at the beginning of 2018, April of 2018 around that time.

Imhallef A Lofaro :

2018

The Witness :

Yes. During that period when the blog was heavily active there was a point where he switched bloging platforms; so he started with one system for the site and then switched one other. But this was the period during which the website was the most active, during which the blogs was the most active. End of 2015 to beginning of 2018; covering the period just before the Panama Papers broke; and activity increased massively while journalist were sending questions to the government of Malta just before the publication of the Panama Papers. Continued after that, continued peaking after that. There was a lull just after my mother’s murder and then he resumed after that with a couple of post targeting the Daphne project and my brothers and I. Also in the report I covered his activity outside his blog. He had this ..

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Facebook.

The Witness :

No, I didn’t really have much time to go into facebook in this; there are no screenshot from facebook; it just the report does cover his membership of hate groups on facebook, I mean secret hate groups; and ask covers some of his other general activity but there are no screenshots on his facebook profile. I simply.. I mean this took over a hundred hours just to go to his blog alone. So it would take a lot more time to include facebook.

But I included his .. this show that he had on ONE TV called “Taghna t- Tnejn” with Luke Dalli I think his name, is Helena Dalli’ s son. And this show had a recurring segment on it called ‘El Faba’ which was about my mother. It portrait her as a kind of deranged witch; these are some screenshots which I included from the videos. There are copies of the videos I could find that have the segments on one of the CDs. I downloaded those from YouTube; they are available on the ONE account; I mean there are some recurring themes in the video. For example my mother as an a rabid PN supporter; it’s a man who is

playing her in the video. There is a point which you can ..there is a frame where can actually see the man’s face; with a wig and a prosthetic nose to look like a hooked nose. Candles around to make it look like a sort of occult environment, and often with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the table and the character is often seen boring, shots of whisky and drinking from them and so on. This is one still from the video .. see part of the actor’s face.

Imhallef A Lofaro :

But were those showed on TV?

The Witness :

These were on TV yes. They were broadcast on ONE TV as I mean broadcast over the year and then they were uploaded on YouTube by ONE on the ONE account. Here you can see the bottle of Jack Daniel’s; thus one of the recurring themes of video..

Imhallef A Lofaro :

And the reference is to be made to her by name?

The Witness :

It was..; I mean it was obviously my mother; it was a very unsettle portrait of my mother. The things that you see in the video are recurring themes of general government propaganda. My mother as an agent of the nationals party as a witch that’s why there are the candles to bring in the occult; as a woman just at home with nothing better to do. Just the kind of general misogyny; masks on the table, I am not sure what that supposes to mean exactly. And the character also whereas kind of colorful clothes which is some things that Glenn Bedingfield frequently mentioned about my mother making fun of her clothing and that kind of thing. The character also mentions people like Glenn Bedingfield often said were friends of my mother for example Richard Cachia Caruana; it just .. it’s extremely disturbing. Anyway, that’s one of the CDs there are whole copies of the entire show. This appears as a segment of veering length

Imhallef A Lofaro :

It was once a week you said?

The Witness :

I don’t know; I don’t know. On YouTube I don’t think all of the episodes were uploaded. These are the ones that I could find on the YouTube account, because ONE TV doesn’t have a video archived. I also included on one of the CDs, so one of the CDs has a full copy in PDF format, a PDF format for every archived blogpost that I could get from archive.today. The other one has a full

copy of every single blogpost in PDF and HDL format from the Way Back Machine which is run by an organization called The Internet Archive. These were all done by hand. Because there is no way to alternate them, so for every blogpost I and some people who were assisting me saved every copy as a PDF. Now because the archive site don’t archive images for many of them the majority the images are actually missing. There would have been an image of my mother, or an image of me and my brothers, or some other kind of image that Glenn Bedingfield would have put on the post. Many of those are missing unfortunately, there is no way to public to reveal them.

Imhallef A Lofaro :

So would be actually be her now not actors.

The Witness :

Yes, on his blog it would actually of my mother. It would be actually photos of my mother. So on it’s on the third CD label C that .. “Taghna t-Tnejn” episodes. And on the fourth CD I put a selection of .. I mean they are duplicates of some of the archive blogpost that I thought fit into several brought categories where I saw patterns. For example there is a subfolder on the CD of selected archived post that are reproduced statements issued by Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi. Or other post in support of Keith Schembri and Konrad Mizzi; just to reproduces form their personal statements or emails or so on.

There is another category of post which I selected which are once that directly target my mother. For example post which one of the ones that I found the most disturbing is a post with a photo of my mother getting into the car that she was renting, that wasn’t the car that was blown up; it was the one before. But it was one of the cars that was actually being followed by the hitman. I know because I also used that car during that summer, and my mother shown getting into the car and you can see the number plate of the car; the make of the car; the location. It just everything. It’s not even.. the number plate isn’t blurred, nothing. Its just there for all to see.

There others with photos of my mother at coffee shops that she sometimes went to. And one of them is identified as Yorkdale for example which was also identified by Yorgen Fenech to the middleman Melvin Theuma as a place that my mother would often visit. And then there is another category of post which defend Electrogas sort of rebuttals to post that my mother was publishing on her websites about Electrogas. In spring – summer of 2017 I was working with my mother on a leak of documents from Electrogas. My mother was using documents from that leak to publish her own reports, and Glenn Bedingfield published rebuttals on behalf of the government or on behalf of Electrogas or some other persons; rebutting my mother’s post.

These are topics within which he didn’t really have a personally ..had economic interest that we know … Electrogas for example. It wasn’t, there must have been some other reason. Within the CD I also included another post which is also particularly disturbing which I couldn’t find in any of the archives but it was so disturbing at the time it was published that my mother took screenshots of the post on Glenn Bedingfield’s blog and published it on her website. So I included a copy of that too.

I also included a copy of a over 200 screenshots of post on Glenn Bedingfield’s blog that include the photos that were submitted to the OSCE around the time that my mother’s bank accounts were frozen when Chris Cardona took out the precautionary warrant against her. These were submitted to the OSCE as evidence in the same way that where is submitting information now. Luckily we kept on archive of what we submitted to the OSCE and this is included on the CD. So I think that covers all of the contents.

One other thing that I didn’t mention is that during one of the periods within which Glenn Bedingfield’ s website was down or run registered another website was running called “Taste Your Own Medicine”. An the closure of that website coincided with the revival of Glenn Bedingfield’ s website. I, within the archive I also included post that came after my mother was murdered. Once with photos with my brothers and I for example and that kind of thing. It’s true again that you could access these posts yourselves on the archive, but the facility of having all of the PDF is available is that – that it makes it much easier to do your own statistical research. For example by searching the phrase ‘Bidnija Bogan’. In the folder of the archive post you can see that Glenn Bedingfield mentions that phrase 80 times in the archive post alone. The word Bidnija is mentioned at least a 150 times in the archive post. You could then search for other words like Daphne for example or Yorkdale, or anything associated with my mother. And it makes it much easier to do that.

The important thing to stress is that the archives are not a complete copy of everything Glenn Bedingfield ever published. We have only a sort of limited timeframe within which post were archived; covering distinct periods on his blog. So there are some from 2016 and end of 2015, then to 2017. There are gaps definitely, and there are some posts which were never archived by this third party archiving websites.

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Would there be a reason for that?

The Witness :

The post might have not been linked anywhere or perhaps Glenn Bedingfield deleted them; and the archive site would have then picked up the deletion and deleted it form their own archives. For example this post that I mentioned that Glenn Bedingfield published that sort of announces my mother’s death around the beginning of 2017 I couldn’t find that anywhere apart from my mother’s website. Glenn Bedingfield did publish that post because I saw it on his website with my own eyes when it was published that year; but I couldn’t find it on any of the archived site. So there are post site that are..which have disappeared from the record unless Glenn Bedingfield has his own backup.

A lot of this is extremely disturbing material.

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Is there a connection to the truth project?

The Witness :

He does post about the truth project sometime, and about the Joseph project for example like. It had varying names. He also uses slogans which intersect with other government propaganda campaigns like ‘Galizia barra’ for example, and things like that. He echoes these sorts of messages.

Dr Therese Comodini Cachia :

….you have …CDs?

The Witness :

Sorry?

Dr Therese Comodini Cachia :

You have 4 CDs?

The Witness :

I have 4 CDs yes. I tried to put everything on a pen-drive but there are so many files in the archive that it was taking for ever to transfer to a pen-drive; and in fact the process is still running. But if you don’t have a CD reader in the computer that you are using its possible to use an external one that are very cheap, and just can be plugged in and out of any computer. That’s what I use.

Dr Therese Comodini Cachia :

In vista li rrid nara dak kollu qabel ix-xhieda tas-Sur Bedingfield jekk nistghu ma nisimghuhx this Wednesday ahjar ghax jidher li hemm volumi kbar li rrid nara.

Imhallef J Said Pullicino :

…li huwa s-sustanza.

Dr Therese Comodini Cachia :

Iva imma xtaqt nara ezatt ..

The Witness :

Sorry, this is something that I’ve been working on for months. It’s the volume of material is enormous ..

Imhallef J Said Pullicino :

…..the Board probably would be the general trend of the exercise and that was it … rather then the particular incidence. …has to go through them to see… but basically ..

The Witness :

I mean the compiling the material took months, but as a review it’s very.. you can pickup patterns very quickly by even ran the ..selecting post from the archive its you can pick up patterns almost immediately ..

Imhallef J Said Pullicino :

…..because its one element in a picture, you know?

The Witness :

Yes of course.

Imhallef J Said Pullicino :

And you have to see how it fits rather then ..

Imhallef A Lofaro :

And what the other blog? The Taste Your Own Medicine. Do you know who the author of that blog was?

The Witness :

No I have no idea. No idea. I mean there are suspicions, but as a fact I have no idea.

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Ok.

Imhallef J Said Pullicino :

…you suggesting we establishing at later date hux hekk? Jekk qed nifhem tajjeb.

Dr Therese Comodini Cachia :

I am not quite sure how far we are going to get today. I mean I am prepared from the remaining 2 witnesses and we can stay; but I am not sure if the Board is going to listen to both of them and ..

Imhallef A Lofaro :

Lestejna mis-Sur Caruana Galizija?

Dr Therese Comodini Cachia :

From Matthew I don’t have any more questions ..

Din hija s-sustanza tax-xhieda ta’ Matthew Caruana Galizia, riprodott, dettata minnu stess fil-prezenza ta’ l-istess xhud.

Niddikjara li traskrivejt bl-ahjar hila tieghi x-xhieda ta’ l-istess xhud.

Saviour Scicluna Traskrittur