This country is getting more absurd by the second.
Last Saturday, a foreign inmate at the Corradino prison staged a brief but dramatic escape attempt. Not exactly a Shawshank Redemption scenario: it seems that Perry Ingumar Toornsta, 32 from the Netherlands – currently serving a 20-year sentence for drug trafficking – somehow managed to jump out of a police van on the way back from prison leave, and then gave his pursuers the slip for the grand total of around six minutes... by which time he was re-arrested in Paola square, and then taken back to prison.
This happened on Saturday 10 August at around 8pm... although you would be forgiven for not knowing this, because – contrary to standard practice in such cases – there was no official statement or communication to inform the public. No DOI press release, no CMRU report, no nothing. In fact, we only got to know thanks to l-Orizzont, which covered the story on Tuesday (three days later).

That day, this newspaper received an anonymous phone-call to say that Toornstra had also been severely beaten upon re-entering prison, to the tune of a few broken ribs.
Right: the obvious first step was to ascertain whether or not the man did indeed sustain those injuries. And so (naively, I admit) I called the Justice Ministry and the office of the prisons’ director for a confirmation. My questions were simple: is it true that Mr Perry Ingumar Toorntsta sustained serious injuries in prison between 10 August and 12 August? And if so, would it be possible to describe the nature of these injuries?
Sorry, came the reply, but it is not possible to disclose any information about the case at present. Why not, I asked? Answer: because there is a magisterial inquiry going on.
Oh? This was suddenly interesting. So am I to understand that an incident deemed unworthy of any form of public announcement, is at the time same also considered serious enough to warrant an magisterial inquiry? What are we to make of this huge contradiction?
But the biggest anomaly of all is... what the heck has a magisterial inquiry got to do with my question in the first place?
All right, time to call a spade a gardening implement with which to dig holes. There is an overwhelming tendency in this country to assume that a magisterial inquiry automatically precludes government officials from confirming even the most basic facts about any given case.
But this is utter bollocks, for two very simple reasons:
1) the magisterial inquiry was at the time concerned only with the attempted break-out, and not with the allegations of violence at all;
2) what I asked for was confirmation that an individual prisoner had been injured. I didn’t ask how he came to be injured... so answering my question would not in any way have prejudiced the outcome of the inquiry.

Besides, this is basic information we are talking about here. In a sense I shouldn’t even have had to ask: the raw facts should be disclosed as a matter of course by the prison authorities themselves, who are after all responsible for the well-being of people in their care.
But that, I suppose, is what happens in civilised countries. Here in Malta, no confirmation of any kind was forthcoming, and the article appeared on Wednesday full of words like “alleged”, “allegedly” and “unconfirmed reports”. (It also contained an unfortunate mistake: I misquoted Mid-Dlam Ghad Dawl spokesperson George Busuttil as saying that the inquiring magistrate “came accompanied by a Dutch embassy official”. This is not strictly speaking true: the two visited the prison separately, even if on the same day.)

Anyhow: on Thursday, I received another phone-call, informing me that apart from the broken ribs mentioned in the article, Mr Toornsta had also broken an arm and lost several teeth. More to the point, he had been re-hospitalised that same morning, this time for passing blood in his water: a symptom consistent with internal bleeding.
Considering the severity of these new new allegations, I went back to the Ministry for a second shot. My questions remained virtually unchanged: what is Toornstra’s precise condition? Is it true that he was readmitted to hospital? Can the ministry confirm that he had a broken arm?
Sure enough, the same old irrelevant answer also came back unchanged: “There is a magisterial inquiry going on.”
And when I insisted on more information, to my utter bewilderment I was directed to “ask the Dutch embassy”.

Well, I’ll be damned. It seems that after 20 years with the PN in government, we have progressed little since the good old days of Xandir Malta. Maltese government won’t give you the information you need? Never fear, turn to foreign sources instead. So it was in the case of the EgyptAir hijack disaster in 1985... when it fell to Italy’s Rai Due to inform us that 66 passengers had been blown to smithereens in the most seriously botched rescue operation in aviation history. (This, mind you, a few minutes after Xandir Malta had hailed the same rescue operation as a “Huge Success”, and reported that none of the hostages had been killed.)

Back to the present, and I am pleased to be able to conclude this article by stating that today (Saturday, exactly a week after the original incident) the Justice Ministry has finally confirmed that, yes, Toornstra suffered injuries involving broken bones shortly after his attempted escape.
But guess what? The confirmation came after the four prison wardens involved in the incident were arraigned in court this morning.

Gee, thanks. But now that those wardens have been charged, I no longer need any official confirmation. What I would like, however, is an explanation for why the prison authorities failed spectacularly to disclose the FACT (as opposed to that awful word, “allegation”) that a prisoner had been seriously injured under questionable circumstances last Saturday. I would also appreciate a reason for the Justice Ministry’s coy reluctance to confirm details which should by rights be in the public domain... until, of course, the details became public of their own accord.
And lastly, I would like to be directed (chapter and verse, please) to the precise article in the Laws of Malta which precludes government officials from doing their job, simply because there is a “magisterial inquiry going on.”
(All this, mind you, in a country which just happens to be discussing “Freedom of Information” even as I write. Ha, ha, ha...)