Nicholas Azzopardi death inquiry reopened after family’s investigations

READ MORE Interview with Reno Azzopardi | Missing links | Discrepancies in evidence | Inconsistencies in eyewitnesses' evidence | Injuries incompatible with alleged fall?

Police Commissioner John Rizzo has asked Attorney General Peter Grech to reopen the 2008 magisterial inquiry into the death of Nicholas Azzopardi.

Rizzo's request follows a series of articles published by MaltaToday in which discrepancies, inconsistencies and doubts over whether Nicholas Azzopardi's injuries were compatible with the alleged fall were raised by the family.

Azzopardi passed away in 2008 after sustaining serious injuries in an "accident" while under arrest at the Police Headquarters in Floriana.

Shortly before dying on 23 April 2008, the 38-year-old man was filmed telling his family that he had been severely beaten by the police and thrown off the adjacent bastions.

Three magisterial inquiries and an internal police inquiry have since exonerated the police of all wrongdoing.

But Azzopardi's family has all along insisted that these inquiries overlooked vital clues and misinterpreted crucial data that would otherwise point towards foul play.

The most shocking of all is how all inquiries overlooked glaring gaps in evidence and contradictions in police testimony.

In fact, it is the alleged doctoring of CCTV footages that have prompted Rizzo to see that the case is referred back to Magistrate Anthony Vella who carried out two of the three inquiries.

MaltaToday can confirm that serious discrepancies of eyewitnesses was ignored by the inquiries, while the most crucial evidence of all - the CCTV footage of the Floriana depot - had been heavily tampered with.

The footage was prepared by court expert Martin Bajada and former police inspector Paul Caruana. The footage had been edited and entire sequences of frames - which would have been crucial towards determining what really happened on the fateful night of 9 April 2008 - were entirely deleted.

The footage from at least five CCTV cameras is completely missing - having been overwritten - and in one case a camera overlooking a central yard is missing because the camera was disconnected.

More suspicious still is the fact that a critical 13-second section - that would have confirmed or denied at least one aspect of the official version of events - was deleted.

Apart from a police investigation initiated just hours after the incident, Judge Albert Manche was appointed to hold an inquiry by former home affairs minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici, in conjunction with the magisterial inquiry held by Magistrate Anthony Vella.

Judge Manche failed to appoint an independent IT expert to analyse the integrity of the CCTV footage prepared for him by former police inspector Paul Caruana and court expert Martin Bajada, and the footage was tabled in Parliament together with his report.

In his testimony, Assistant Commissioner Michael Cassar - overseeing the police investigation in the absence of Police Commissioner John Rizzo, who was at the time in hospital being treated for a long-term health issue - told Manche' that Bajada "had a tough job selecting the relevant sequences of the CCTV footage".

In the magisterial inquiry held by Magistrate Anthony Vella, once again the CCTV footage provided by the Police was accepted and at no point were questions asked about the missing or edited footage.

In the footage he prepared for the Manche' report, Bajada omitted the exact time sequence and synchronisation between cameras, which is necessary to select the correct data.

Among other omissions and mistakes in Bajada's report was deleted footage from a number of cameras and footage was attributed to the wrong cameras.

Requests by Azzopardi's family to verify whether the original back-up footage used by Bajada to select the images still exists were never answered.

MaltaToday's print edition today carries Part 5 of the Nicholas Azzopardi case