In 2002, MaltaToday campaigned for the rightful compensation from government for Anthony Mifsud’s frame-up. Six years later, Mifsud’s personal action against his aggressors comes to an end. MATTHEW VELLA recounts his tragic ordeal

It is 26 years later and after 21 years in court, former prison warden Anthony Mifsud was awarded €186,439 incompensation for the infringement of his human rights.
The case dates back to May 4, 1987 after he was wrongly imprisoned for three years and tortured in connection with the escape of two prisoners – the late Louis Bartolo and Ahmed Khalil Habib – in 1982.
After being arrested, Mr Mifsud, a prison warder, was held for five days in the depot where he was beaten by Superintendent Carmelo Bonello and Superintendent Joe Psaila, and coerced at gunpoint into signing a false statement. Mifsud was subsequently acquitted of all charges with the Court itself declaring that he was the victim of a frame-up.
This week the Court found that the police had violated his fundamental rights by subjecting him degrading treatment. It ordered the current Police Commissioner John Rizzo, former Police Commissioner Laurence Pullicino, Superintendents Carmelo Bonello and Joe Psaila to pay a total of €186,349.
The latter was promoted under a Nationalist administration to Assistant Commissioner of Police, and made Director of Prisons under the Fenech Adami administration. He now holds a senior security post within the Group 4 security group managed at Mater Dei. This is not the first time he was found guilty of having framed a person for a false crime.
In 1989, Joseph Asciak (‘il-Banana’) filed for damages after being arrested by Psaila. Asciak was acquitted by a Magistrates Court, which declared he had been “an innocent victim of a malign ploy to fabricate evidence to blame him for something of which he was not guilty.”

In 1990, during the trial by jury of Martin Gaffarena – a Nationalist activist accused of placing a bomb outside the Safi MLP club in 1986 – it was revealed that Psaila had illegally procured Gaffarena’s fingerprints from a glass he had drunk from, which were later placed on a bomb. Gaffarena spent three years in preventive custody throughout his trial by jury.
It was in 1982 that prison warden Anthony Mifsud became the scapegoat for the high-profile jailbreak of Louis Bartolo and Palestinian terrorist Ahmed Khalili Habib, in prison for the murder of a Lebanese businessman.
Bartolo had murdered the notorious Labour political thug and Lorry Sant acolyte, John Bondin (‘il-Fusellu’) in an altercation between the two men outside the Kavallieri Hotel in St Julian’s. As Bondin was fetching his pistol from his Mercedes’ luggage boot, Bartolo shot him in the hand. Disabled, Bondin dropped his pistol and ran to the driver’s seat, switched on the ignition and drove towards Bartolo. Bartolo shot again through the windscreen and Bondin died just seconds later as he crashed into a house on Spinola Road.

Prison break
Bartolo’s escape was plotted while awaiting trial in prison, in a deal he struck with prison director Ronald Theuma. Convict Ahmed Habib had agreed to finance the jailbreak through the Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO)– only if a letter could be sent out of prison without being tampered with.
Bartolo faced Ronald Theuma with his demand: send the letter out untouched, in return for Lm17,000. The letter was mailed to Habib’s network in Iraq. From Greece, word came to Habib that the money would be arranged.
Theuma’s first instalment was delivered outside the St Luke’s Hospital’s phone booths. The rest would be delivered upon receiving a package for Bartolo.
The plot worked like clockwork: at his last court appearance, Bartolo approached two men, recognisable by an envelope they were carrying with an agreed password scrawled over it. There he gave them detailed instructions as to what he needed, after which they would later give the package to Theuma himself.
In the meantime, Bartolo worked on a set of mock prison keys, memorising the keys used by the prison wardens, and then fabricating them out of wood. Theuma had arranged to let him work inside the carpentry shop.
Soon enough, Theuma received the package, which he handed over to Bartolo. Inside there was all he had asked for: a pistol with ammunition, and a walkie-talkie which Habib used to instruct his contacts to pay the remaining Lm5,000 to Theuma.
Preparing for the escape, Bartolo instructed his wife to go to the UK for her safety. In the month that ensued, Theuma moved Bartolo and Habib to another part of the prison to facilitate their escape. From inside his cell, Bartolo had been slowly filing the metal window mesh of his prison door, leaving it just intact enough until he needed to prise it fully open upon escape.
On the night of 10 June, 1982, after lights-out at 8:30pm Bartolo prised open the mesh. He lifted the security bar of the door some “10.15 degrees”, as he meticulously noted in a letter he later sent to MPs from his hideout in the UK, “just enough to squeeze through”. He relocked the door, and then opened Habib’s cell.

The frame-up
Anthony Mifsud was in his 20s when, enrolled through the government’s Dejma workers’ scheme, he became a prison warden, hoping to graduate to police officer 14 months on.
Relatively new to the prison, Mifsud provided the ideal scapegoat for such a high-profile escape. The morning after Bartolo’s escape, he was instructed to go to Corradino prison. Upon arrival he was put into a car and driven to a lock-up. There he was interrogated by superintendents Joseph Psaila and Carmel Bonello, and another sergeant and police inspector, where he was accused of plotting Bartolo’s escape.
Mifsud would later tell the Courts in his suit for compensation how Bonello had punched him, and then pressed a gun to his head, asking him where Bartolo was. Mifsud could hear the trigger being pulled. He was beaten repeatedly, at one stage losing consciousness.
He woke up in a police cell vomiting blood. In the interrogation room he was beaten with a whip in the presence of the two superintendents and the late Deputy Police Commissioner Anthony Mifsud Tommasi.
Mifsud Tommasi told Mifsud that if he did not reveal Bartolo’s whereabouts, he would be taken to the lunatic asylum forever, be killed or sent to prison.
Bonello was fidgeting with a big knife, stabbing the table, while Psaila sat at a typewriter. They accused him of receiving Lm2,000 to open Bartolo’s cell door and ordered him to sign a statement of admission.
Tortured into submission, Mifsud signed the confession, then was taken to his flat to change his clothes. His bloodied clothes had been taken away from him. In the afternoon Mifsud was arraigned in court, and then taken to Corradino prison under arrest. Prison director Ronald Theuma told him upon arrival: “I know you were an accomplice to Bartolo. I wouldn’t have asked for Lm2,000 but for Lm100,000. Now you have a freshly-painted cell waiting for you.”
Mifsud spent three years in prison before he was acquitted in a trial by jury in 1985.

UK renegade
Now working in the UK as a security officer under the assumed name of Dennis, the former British Army paratrooper Louis Bartolo, appalled by the frame-up of Anthony Mifsud, started his own campaign to petition MPs over the real facts of his escape.
In his letter to then Commissioner of Police Lawrence Pullicino and government and Opposition MPs, Bartolo wrote: “The officer [Anthony Mifsud] had nothing to do with our escape. I swear it on God and all my family, that God strike them dead. He is innocent and has been framed and probably beaten to sign such a statement.”
In the letter, he gave a scrupulously detailed breakdown of his prison escape including diagrams of the keys he had fabricated, and how Ronald Theuma was in on the deal with the terrorist organisation that funded the jailbreak. Upon Nationalist re-election, Bartolo gave himself up, returning to Malta to face trial. He was acquitted of the crime on grounds of self-defence.

Trials of a man
Bartolo never let up on his campaign for the rightful compensation for Mifsud’s terrifying ordeal and to bring Ronald Theuma to justice, even chaining himself outside the prime minister’s office at Castille and Theuma’s house.
But Mifsud’s victimisation had scarred his life forever, suffering an intense psychological trauma that haunts him to this very day. Unlike other victims of crime and political injustices, Mifsud never received a cent in compensation from the government, having to take recourse in a civil liability suit against Pullicino as former Commissioner, and superintendents Bonello and Psaila.
As he had recounted to MaltaToday in 2002:
“I am disappointed because justice was not done in my regard. I lost my job, I cannot work to this very day because of my mental state. I have to seek medical help constantly because of what happened and I was humiliated before the entire nation. For the authorities it’s as if I did not exist and that my case never happened.”

WHO GOT PAID?
Compensation to victims of crimes and injustice

2003
• On the eve of the general election, the family of Nardu Debono, murdered in the police headquarters in 1980 by the police, is awarded Lm150,000
• Nationalist mayor Pietru Pawl Busuttil is awarded Lm40,000 for his false arrest in 1986
• Joseph Axiaq awarded Lm10,500 for his frame-up in the Safi explosion of 1986
2001
• Nationalist activist Martin Gaffarena is awarded Lm34,000 for his alleged frame-up over the explosion outside the Mqabba police station in 1985
• Police constable Raymond Gatt awarded Lm1,800 for injuries in the shoot-out at the Carmel Abdilla wedding in Zejtun in 1989
• PN activist Joseph Cassar awarded Lm1,400 for injuries sustained in a political meeting in Rabat in 1987

2000
• Police constable Victor Bonavia awarded Lm700 for the stabbing incident inside the Labour Macina headquarters in 1987
1996
• Compensation for the 18 PN activists involved in the ‘balavostri’ (balustrades) incident outside the Zebbug PN club in 1981, totalling Lm19,000
• PC Peter Barberi awarded Lm1,337 for the bomb explosion outside the Sliema police station
1995
• Police constable Tarcisio Cassar awarded Lm1,400 for injuries sustained in the 1980s shoot-out at the Abdilla wedding in Zejtun

1994
• PC Joseph Aquilina awarded Lm450 for serious personal injuries from a bomb explosion outside the Valletta police station in 1981
• Saviour Debono awarded Lm2,000 for injuries at the Tal-Barrani incidents of 1986
Antoinette Cutajar, beaten on election day 1987, awarded Lm1,250
• PC Carmelo Attard awarded Lm2,250 for injuries at the Abdilla wedding

1993
• PC Nicholas Vassallo awarded Lm2,850 for injuries at the Abdilla wedding
• Sergeant James Grech awarded Lm2,500 for injuries during the balavostri incident in Zebbug
• Carmel Azzopardi and Lawrence Zammit, Lm2,850 and Lm100 respectively for injuries at a Rabat political meeting in 1987
1992
• PC Joseph Vassallo awarded Lm6,000 for injuries at the Abdilla wedding
• Philip Pisani awarded Lm950 after being shot at Zebbug in 1987
• Mario Spiteri awarded Lm3,500 for personal injuries in Zejtun meeting in 1981

 

 

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