‘I’m no cat killer’: Mount Carmel patient protests seven-year committal on website

Nicholas Grech, the man believed to be responsible for the Mosta cat killings but acquitted of all charges due to insanity, is challenging his seven-year detention inside the Mount Carmel mental health facility.

Grech, now aged 44, was in 2014 sentenced to be kept at Mount Carmel Hospital for as long as is necessary after court-appointed psychiatrists had told the courts he had no criminal intent during a four-year stint of mock crucifixions of cats and dogs.

Grech was said to have been suffering from impaired judgement due to his mental condition, and was declared insane and therefore not criminally liable for his actions. He had since been held in custody at Mount Carmel Hospital without any means of communication, the lawyer said.

“This arrest is illegal, and with or without cure, Grech appears to have recovered,” his lawyer Rachel Tua said, presenting documentation from medical professionals saying Grech cannot be incarcerated without any prospect of being freed.

Tua is asking the courts to hear witnesses previously involved in Grech’s psychiatric assessment to determine whether there are still grounds for his continued detention. Habeas corpus is a legal remedy whereby a person claiming unlawful detention or imprisonment is brought before a court to have the legality of the arrest examined. Such cases are always regarded as urgent.

Grech, an engineer from Mosta, had been charged with animal cruelty, violation of burial grounds, trespassing on religious grounds, forcing entry into the Mosta parish church and the Speranza chapel, and vilifying the Catholic religion. The hangings and crucifixions of dog and cat carcasses around Mosta dated back to 16 October 2011, with the last case taking place on 3 February 2014. In the last incident, a dog and cat were found hung upside down at the side and on the front of the Mosta Church.

Grech would find dead animals to hang, accused claiming that it was his way of “passing on a message against animal cruelty”.

In a website he has been running from the mental health facility he is incarcerated in, Grech documented the entire saga of his psychiatric evaluations, the medicines prescribed, his complaints to mental health commissioners, and his protestations at specialist psychiatriat Dr David Cassar’s evaluations of his mental condition, whom he blames for his prolonged detention.

Grech was already committed back in 2002 on a diagnosis by David Cassar due to paranoid psychosis, schizophrenia, and mental alteration.

Grech has complained to the Commissioner for Mental Health on several occasions, as well as the Ombudsman and the Chairman of Psychiatry, over the side-effects he was incurring from the administration of Fluanxol.

In a complaint to mental health commissioner John Cachia, the ombudsman requested Cassar to prescribe Grech a medicine that causes “less side effects”. Instead Grech was administered Risperdal Consta, a long-acting injection, which the inmate claims causes him just as many severe side-effects.

“Every time you are injected this diabolic poison you feel humiliated, helpless... forced by a pimp into prostitution... You know another part of you, of your health, is lost but can do nothing other than seeing your strength go away a bit by bit,” Grech wrote in his online blog.

Grech complained that he suffered from difficult to sleep due to the injection and Parkinsonism in his left leg. He also said medical doctors doing ward rounds made light banter of the Risperdal’s side-effect of impotence, by jokingly suggesting the prescription of a specific medication to reverse that effect.

“He is killing and disabling me slowly slowly, first with the injection Fluanxol that so much makes you sick with depression that it makes you commit suicide, and then with injection Risperdal which besides making you suffer from depression, with it he was also making me sick with Parkinson disease amongst others, and now with Olanzapine that makes you drowsy, suffer from delirium, and can increase your blood pressure and disabled me left me suffer from impotence amongst others with their side effects”

Grech says that in 2011, despite his past problems of psychiatric evaluation, he had been leading a relatively ordinary life, and that he regularly engaged in exercise as a cyclist. It was during these cycling treks that he would encounter roadkill, whereupon he decided to use the carcasses of animals run over by cars, to make his statement.

“At the end I decided that instead of leaving them stranded on the roads, utilise some of them and hang them crucified in several places in my hometown Mosta. In a country where the agenda of the political parties is primarily dictated from behind by contractors and speculators who finance them... (I) opted for a method that is entirely original and at the same time harms no one but nevertheless creates a sensation...” Grech wrote.

“I asked myself if a crucified animal would make them think of those forgotten chameleons, frogs, hedgehogs and snakes to mention a few which get killed and bulldozed from their habitats because of this greed.”

Grech details in his long statement of having hanged 15 animal carcasses on 12 occasions over the period of two years, six of which in broad daylight, all bar one occasion on the 16th of the month.

“One can say that I managed to break a record... there was a Police force where those assigned to the case were truly without vision that couldn’t predict the obvious most obvious: in fact the biggest record was made by them, where despite the consistencies I used in the dates, in the choice of places and always in the same town, they never succeeded in catching me red-handed, neither getting out of home, neither walking with the cumbersome of the wooden cross with the animal carcass on it tied to my belly, and neither hanging it.”

Grech admits he had been careless in not deleting images of the carcasses from his laptop. “They would not have had the slightest proof to incriminate me, neither the slightest finger print nor any DNA evidence, and during interrogation I simply told them of a CD I had at home containing all the information and history like from where I had collected the dead animals, etc., to convince them even more than they were already convinced that I had killed no animals.”

In August 2020, Dr David Cassar approved a restriction on Grech’s freedom to communicate from Mount Carmel Hospital.