59% believe Nicholas Azzopardi’s death was police responsibility

Karl Schembri
A survey into the Nicholas Azzopardi tragedy has revealed that 59% of the Maltese believe that even though the inquiries have ruled out police involvement in his fatal fall from police headquarters, the police were still responsible for his death while under their custody.
The survey was commissioned by BrainBox as part of its research for the programme Wara il-Każ, which will be investigating the case and will be broadcast on One TV this coming Sunday.
The overwhelming majority of respondents believe that Azzopardi’s death was still the police corp’s responsibility although a magisterial inquiry and an independent inquiry by retired Judge Albert Manchè ruled out any foul play from the police.
On the other hand, 28.8% believe the police were not responsible for his death, while 12% said they did not know.
Despite the tragedy happening while Azzopardi was under police custody on 9 April, when he fell off a bastion wall behind Police Headquarters in Floriana, none of the two inquiries found any wrongdoing from the police side.
The same survey showed that 61.5% believe the authorities are hiding something from the public when footage, DVDs and photographs that form part of the inquiry are not released for journalists’ scrutiny. In fact, the Attorney General is keeping sealed a number of photographs and DVDs related to the case from being scrutinised by journalists and the public at large.
Another 15% said they did not know, when asked if the authorities were hiding something from the public, while 23.5% said no.
The survey was commissioned to Computer Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI) and was conducted over a period of three days commencing Tuesday 30 September 2008. In seeking to collect responses optimally representative of the Maltese population over the age of 18, a random sample of participants were approached and a total of 400 valid responses were collected.
Contact details were obtained from the local telephone directory, while the majority of interviews were conducted between 5:00pm and 8:00pm. The research study is estimated to be representative of the Maltese population (over 18 years of age) at a 95% confidence interval, with an accuracy level of +/- 5%.

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