For weeks, his name was spoken in a Valletta courtroom by men with every reason to lie. Now that the trial is over, we can ask the questions that we were never able to ask from outside that room.
If Dr. Chris Cardona was truly implicated in this case, and if there was ever a shred of real evidence connecting him to the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, why did anyone need to write a letter about it?
Evidence doesn’t need to be manufactured. It exists, or it doesn’t. Testimony from witnesses who were actually there doesn’t need a script. And yet, according to sworn testimony heard in that courtroom, a letter did exist passed from Keith Schembri to Dr. Adrian Vella, and from Vella to Yorgen Fenech. Fenech himself told the jury, in his own words, that he understood it to contain a script for him to use to pin Cardona.
A script. Not a confession. Not a piece of evidence. A script, something written in advance, for someone else to read from.
So we ask: who wrote it? Whose idea was it to put Cardona’s name on a page, hand it to a man on trial for his life, a man desperate for anywhere to point? And what did that person stand to gain?
I think the answer is obvious, and I think it says more about the people who wrote it than it ever said about Cardona. A man trying to save himself from a murder charge needed somewhere to point that wasn’t at the people closest to him. Cardona was convenient. A former Minister, a public figure, someone whose name would generate headlines the moment it was spoken in that courtroom. He was, in the plainest sense of the word, expendable to people who were never willing to be expendable themselves.
They tried to sacrifice him. They did not succeed.
Not because he had powerful friends, or because he hired the right lawyers, or because he shouted the loudest. It did not succeed because the truth, when it’s actually tested, cross-examined, compared against timelines, checked against forensic records, weighed against the recollections of a dozen contradicting witnesses does not hold together as well as a script does.
