Accused threatened eight-year-old to reveal where mother was going the night she died

UPDATE 2

In a lengthy deposition before Magistrate Saviour Demicoli this morning during the compilation of evidence against Nizar el Gadi, the court heard Tessie Mifsud - the mother of victim Margaret Mifsud - recount an argument between her two grandchildren over their mother's death.

"Mummy died because of you, when you told daddy where she was going," Tessie Mifsud heard her eldest granddaughter tell her younger sister.

Mifsud said that when she sat them both down, the children told her that their father, Nizar El-Gadi, had threatened the youngest that he would "kill her" unless she told him where their mother was going on the night of April 18.

Margaret Mifsud was found dead inside her car in Bahar ic-Caghaq the day after, and police charged her estranged husband, Nizar El-Gadi with her murder.

Mifsud gave a detailed account of the last time she saw her daughter on April 18, before she set out for a farewell dinner to a colleague in Xemxija. "She kissed her children goodbye, promising them that she wasn't going to be long, switched off her mobile phone so that she won't be bothered by Nizar, and asked for a piece of paper to write the number of a girlfriend of hers on which to call in case of an emergency," Mifsud said.

"I never saw her again," the witness said. "Nizar seems to have got what he wanted, my daughter killed."

Mifsud gave a detailed account of her daughter's relationship with the accused, revealing that she had married him at 22 because she got pregnant out of wedlock, and then had another child while she was still studying law.

"I took them both in, because I didn't want my daughter to lose out on her legal career. And I knew from the very beginning, either out of maternal instinct or because it was clear, that Nizar only wanted to be married to Margaret, and gave  her children, so that he could stay in Malta, while he despised her becoming a lawyer," she said.

Mifsud said that three weeks after their first daughter was born, Nizar left Malta for three whole years, and only returned after Margaret had graduated as a lawyer.

"I knew it from the very start that he would return after she graduated, because he had a clear scope in his mind," she said, adding that Nizar was unemployed, penniless, but full of pretences. "He was argumentative, arrogant and when I had accepted him back home, he continued to play the 'king' and make everything his."

Violent

The witness said that her daughter only sought the wellbeing of her two children and although she was separating, and later had her marriage annulled, always wanted the children's father to be present in their lives.

"But things started to degenerate, and while Margaret remained secretive about her strained relation with Nizar, I started to understand that Nizar was becoming violent with her. One day I noticed a large dark blue bruise on her left inner arm, and also a punch mark on my bedroom's wooden door. When I noticed the dent, he came up to me to say that he was sorry to have caused the dent, which was made while he was playing with the children and accidentally hit the door," Tessie Mifsud said.

She added that she had confronted her daughter to tell her if Nizar was hitting her, but she said nothing, except lower her eyes and ignore the matter.

Some days before the murder, Tessie Mifsud said that her daughter had lodged a police report in Birkirkara, after he tried to strangle her with a string.

Margaret had told her mother that Nizar had ordered her to close the windows and doors, get onto her knees and rest on her elbows, then came from behind her only to wrap the string around her neck asking her to choose between herself or the children.

After that incident, Margaret and her family had packed all of Nizar's belongings and took them to the Birkirkara Police Station.

Crafty

Tessie Mifsud described her former son-in-law as a "crafty man" who despite his inability to do anything, and or never having kept down a job, used to say that he was a trained professional guard with the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and had told her and Margaret that he knew how to kill a man without leaving a trace.

"I thought he was joking," the witness said, adding that besides the threats to Margaret, he was also quite violent with the children.

"He manipulated them, he was nasty and he made them fear him at all times," she said.

"I had discovered him one day sitting on his youngest daughter's head as she crouched on her side by the bed. He told me he was playing, when it was obvious he wasn't. He laughed and said...'she knows the way we play'."

Stalker

During her evidence, Tessie Mifsud spoke about the times Nizar El-Gadi would stalk her and Margaret.

Besides the hours he spent waiting outside his daughter's school in Sliema, Nizar once barged his way into St. Joseph's Convent school in Sliema where he confronted the headmistress, who had to alert the teachers and the police about him.

Another time he stalked the witness as she went to pick up the children from school, and walked with them until she got to her car.

And another time when he frightened her daughter by hiding inside her car, as she was coming out of court.

"He apparently hid inside the hatch-back of her Daihatsu car and frightened her as he emerged to tell her that he knew everything about her, and that she would find him everywhere."

Another time, Margaret found Nizar El-Gadi stalking her as she attended a wedding with another girlfriend.