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Karl Schembri
Lawrence Pullicino has denied ever having intercepted telephone calls or that he was given any such orders in the eighties when he was Police Commissioner in a letter sent to MaltaToday.
Referring to a document just published for the first time in Libertà Mhedda by journalist Dione Borg which is attributed to a SISMI (Italian military secret service) agent writing in 1987, Pullicino categorically denies claims that his force had received telephone interception equipment that was allegedly used to spy on Nationalists.
When contacted, Borg revealed for the first time to MaltaToday that his source was former Nationalist MP Richard Muscat – a ‘detail’ that is not mentioned in his book. Muscat was exiled to Italy during the eighties from where he operated a radio station on behalf of the Nationalist Party.
While asserting his right to sue Borg for libel, Pullicino dismisses the report as “a figment of his (Borg’s) imagination” which “forms the basis of fables.”
The former police commissioner writes: “If it (the secret report) actually exists, it is either the work of somebody wanting to justify his salary and placing in Malta, or else a very sick joke played upon the author which may earn him the title of the greatest fable writer of modern times were the allegations not so serious and defamatory.”
In his letter (see page 21) – in itself a rare public statement by the former commissioner who in 1993 was found guilty of complicity in the 1980 murder of Nardu Debono inside the police depot – he challenges several parts of the report reproduced by Borg.
Pullicino also categorically denies that former Labour Prime Minister Dom Mintoff or his successor, Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici, ever instructed him to bug any telephone calls, and states that he “never resorted to such activity.”
“Even if the police wanted to intercept telephone calls, whether by the Nationalists or others, they could not do so once no equipment for this existed,” he writes.
When contacted, Borg revealed his source for the first time to MaltaToday and hit back at Pullicino by referring to the 1993 court sentence which also found him guilty of perjury.
“I have been authorized by Malta’s Ambassador to Ireland, Richard Muscat, to declare that he was the source who passed me the SISMI document,” Borg said. “The document was originally handed to him by an officer of the Italian Military mission in Malta, who was effectively one of the agents that worked on the internal SISMI report.”
Borg claims that the document entitled, ‘Communications System of the Maltese Armed Forces and Police,’ was written by Italian officers “who knew all the details of what was happening at the time… the operations which the Maltese didn’t know about, but which evidently the Italian authorities were concerned about.”
The report describes in detail the strategic outposts where the military and police trained covertly and allegedly bugged telephone conversations among “Nationalists.” It also documents the alleged secret trafficking of bugging equipment and weapons from Italy and Libya during the eighties.
“Former Police Commissioner Pullicino may choose to consider this report a ‘fabrication’ or a ‘fable’,” Borg said, “perhaps in the same vein in which he and the police authorities treated as ‘fabrication’ and ‘fable’ every charge of police torture, of frame-ups, of shooting by the SMU members on demonstrators in Rabat and of police violence during public meetings in the eighties, Zejtun included.
“To my mind, fabrication reminds me of when the police, when Pullicino was commissioner, denied having tortured Wilfred Cardona at the police depot and tried to convince us that the injuries he sustained were caused by Cardona himself by banging his head on a table during an interrogation,” Borg said.
“It also reminds me of the frame-up on Pietru Pawl Busuttil when someone planted the weapon that was used for a serious crime (the murder of Raymond Caruana) inside Busuttil’s farm. The greatest fable of all was indeed fabricated by whoever had said that Nardu Debono had escaped from the depot, when it is established that he had died after being beaten up during an interrogation when Pullicino was commissioner.”
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