Who Murdered Malta's Most Famous Journalist?

STRASBOURG—Daphne Caruana Galizia was less than a mile from home when her Peugeot 108 exploded and burst into flames last October, killing her instantly and sending shrapnel into a nearby field. She was 53 and the most famous investigative journalist in Malta. In that tiny country, her scoops consistently made life uncomfortable for the powerful, whether in banks or the prime minister’s office. Investigators later found that a sophisticated device had been planted on the car and remotely detonated. In December, after turning to the FBI and Dutch forensic experts for help, Maltese authorities arrested 10 people and eventually charged three Maltese nationals with carrying out the attack. But the bigger question—the one that has reverberated far beyond Malta—remains unanswered: Who ordered the killing?

The journalist had faced death threats and libel suits for years. “Our mother’s death warrant could have been signed two years ago,” Matthew Caruana Galizia, one of Daphne’s three sons, and himself a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, said here on a recent afternoon. He was in Strasbourg to speak before lawmakers at the Council of Europe, the continent’s watchdog for human rights and the rule of law. “It has been like watching her assassination unfold