Police respond to Edwin Grech's claims on daughter's murder
The Police Commissioner John Rizzo has responded to Prof. Edwin Grech's claims and revelaltions about Karin Grech’s murder: "case has been rigorously investigated, and still continues."
The father of Karin Grech, murdered by a letter bomb during the doctor's strike on 28 December 1977, believes the explosive device was manufactured by an expert criminal and that the parcel was created by a carpenter who were both engaged by medical students involved in the strike.
Prof. Edwin Grech, the most prominent of strike-breakers, appears tonight on Net TV's 'Evidenza' to say that he knows the identities of all the perpetrators, including that of a prominent politician who lent his office to the medical students for their meetings.
Grech will say that he divulged the names of these people to police investigators, but none of the suspects were ever questioned.
"I feel abandoned by the police, who never carried out a thorough investigation because they are obstructed by a hidden hand," Grech will say.
A police spokesperson however said that all information the police had received, including that from Prof Grech, had been investigated thoroughly. "The case has been rigorously investigated along these years and is still being intensively investigated to this day. However, as the case is subject to a pending magisterial inquiry, it is felt imprudent to give details of the investigations made."
Grech family this year won €420,000 in compensation for the murder of their daughter, with the Constitutional Court confirming that the bomb had been mailed to Prof Grech in view of the services he had given during a politically sensitive period in the late 1970s.
In 1977, medical students had gone abroad to complete their course as a consequence of the doctors' strike while Prof. Grech and his family had just returned to Malta six months previously. The dispute was triggered when government amended legislation governing medical licensing. On December 28, 1977, a large brown envelope addressed to him was delivered to his house. His daughter, in Malta from her UK school for the Christmas holidays, opened a pen-box shaped parcel in Christmas wrapping paper, that exploded in her hands. She later died in hospital.
Edwin Grech says it was a seasoned bomb maker and "criminal expert" who manufactured the bomb on order of fifth-year medical students who plotted the attempt at a politician's legal office.
Grech claims the implicated politician was only motivated by financial reasons.
Grech has also provided police investigators with the name of a fifth-year medical student, who was however never interrogate because all fifth-year students had by then emigrated to the UK.
Grech claims that a carpenter had told him that another carpenter was involved in the bomb-making, and that faint fingerprints revealed that the sender had some fingers missing.
The parcel bomb was carved out in wood and included two batteries, springs, wires and the explosive.