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Fact check: Independent journalist killed by car bomb in Malta didn't help break Panama Papers story

Chiara Vercellone   | Paste BN
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The claim: Journalist who broke Panama Papers story killed with car bomb

A tweet has resurfaced across social media a year after it went viral, claiming the Panama Papers investigation from 2016 led to a journalist's death.

"Hey, remember when the Panama Papers were released and they showed how basically every wealthy person on the planet was avoiding taxes by offshoring their money and nothing was done about it except the reporter who broke the story was murdered with a car bomb?" reads the tweet screengrab, which was shared more than 7,000 times in one week since it was posted on Facebook Sept. 30.

The Panama Papers refer to a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by more than 300 journalists across the world, who analyzed millions of leaked documents from a whistleblower at the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca that helped hundreds of politicians and elites hide their wealth in tax havens.

The journalist referred to in the post is Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist from Malta. She used part of the information published in the Panama Papers in an independent exposé in 2017 before her death in a car bomb explosion that same year.

But she wasn't part of the group of journalists who investigated the tax scandal, the organization that co-published the probe told Paste BN.

The original tweet now being shared on social media was posted on Sept. 27, 2020, and it had been retweeted more than 90,000 times as of Oct. 6. On Sept. 28, 2020, the Twitter user who made the original claim said he had been "misinformed by articles that linked one journalist to the Panama Papers." That tweet has been shared about 360 times.

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Recent versions of the image currently being shared have accrued thousands of likes independently on Instagram.

Paste BN reached out to the user who shared the image on Facebook for comment.

Galizia not affiliated with Panama Papers investigation

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists co-published the Panama Papers in 2016 after Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, two journalists at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, shared the leaked documents with the organization.

Gerard Ryle, the ICIJ's director, told Paste BN in an email that Caruana Galizia was an independent journalist and "was not part of the team who reported on the Panama Papers."

"She took our reporting and added to it from her own sources, and published based on those sources and our data," Ryle said.

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Caruana Galizia was known in Malta for her reporting on crime and government corruption. She was killed in Oct. 2017, by a car bomb shortly after her last article was published.

Leading up to her death, she had been publishing an exposé on her private blog partly based on documents from the Panamanian investigation that connected offshore wealth to then-Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat and his inner circle, NPR reported at the time.

Three men were arrested in December 2017 and accused of planting the car bomb and detonating it.

In February, one of the suspects was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to the charges of planting and detonating the bomb, The Times of Malta reported.

The two reporters who broke the Panama Papers story, Obermayer and Obermaier, have also said Caruana Galizia was not part of the team. 

Talking about the security risks Panama Papers journalists faced before and after publication, Obermaier told The Harvard Gazette: "Our colleague in Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia – she was not part of the original team, but she reported a lot about the consequences of the Panama Papers – and she was killed in a car bomb."

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And in a Sept. 28, 2020, response to the original tweet now being shared on social media, Obermayer wrote: "Our brave and brilliant colleague Daphne Caruana Galizia did not break the story, she was not even part of the Panama Papers teams. She had her own sources and was obviously dangerous to power. Malta misses her badly. We miss her badly." 

Our rating: False

Based on our research, we rate FALSE the claim that the journalist who broke the Panama Papers investigation was killed by a car bomb. Caruana Galizia, the journalist who was killed in a car bomb, was not part of the team of reporters that analyzed and broke the Panama Papers story. She used parts of the information detailed in the investigation and her own sources to publish an exposé on Malta's prime minister and people close to him.

Our fact-check sources:

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