Several thousand Maltese citizens rallied today to honor an investigative journalist killed by a car bomb, but the prime minister and opposition leader who were chief targets of Daphne Caruana Galizia's reporting stayed away from the gathering.
Participants at the rally in Malta's capital, Valletta, placed flowers at the foot of a memorial to the 53-year-old reporter that sprang up opposite the law court building after her October 16 slaying.
Some wore T-shirts or carried placards emblazoned with words from Caruana Galizia's final blog post: "There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate" in the European Union nation of some 400,000 people.
Police removed a banner describing Malta as a "Mafia state".
The violent and malicious death of a journalist who devoted her professional career to exposing wrong-doing in Malta and raised her three sons there united many of the nation's oft-squabbling politicians.
Malta's two dominant political forces, the ruling Labor and opposition Nationalist parties, participated in the rally which was organized to press demands for justice in her slaying.
But Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told his Labor party's radio station a few hours before the event's start time that he wouldn't attend because he knew the anti-corruption reporter's family didn't want him to be there.
The journalist focused her reporting for years on investigating political corruption and scandals, and reported on Maltese mobsters and the island's drug trafficking.
She also wrote about Maltese links to the so-called Panama Papers leaks about offshore financial havens.
After the rally ended, several hundred participants walked to police headquarters, and sat in the street outside shouting "Shame on you!" and "Resign!
Malta President Marie Louise Coleiro Preca received a delegation from the Civil Society Network, a non-partisan organization of university professors, businessmen, opinion writers and authors in Malta.
The car bombing was "an attack on all of us, every single one of us," Coleiro Preca told them. "We need to see how we are going to work together. We need to unite to have the reform that is needed."
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