Day 17 of the Yorgen Fenech murder trial ended on its most explosive note yet, when defence lawyer Giannella De Marco told former Police Commissioner Lawrence Cutajar “You’re corrupt,” after the defence probed about a tip-off on middleman Melvin Theuma’s arrest date, to which he replied, “I didn’t know the date”.This came near the end of a cross-examination that spent nearly an hour picking apart Cutajar’s secret contacts with Melvin Theuma’s confidant, Edgar Brincat, in the weeks before Theuma’s arrest, moments after Cutajar again denied knowing when police planned to move in.“You were a corrupt Commissioner,” De Marco reiterated at one point during the questioning, with Judge Edwina Grima intervening, telling the defence lawyer she cannot make accusations of that nature.Responding, Cutajar says the investigation was cracked during his tenure as police commissioner.“A bomb leaves very little evidence behind, yet the case was solved,” he says. “I believe I deserve some credit. I made key decisions throughout the investigation.”Earlier in the day, under prosecution questioning, Cutajar had walked jurors through his decades in the force and his account of the murder investigation, including his decision to open a parallel financial probe into Theuma and his version of the Brincat meetings, which he said began over a traffic contravention and were really an attempt to learn what he could about Theuma’s tapes.Once De Marco took over, she accused him of lying under oath about a phone recording he said he’d forgotten, then pressed him on why an ex-commissioner with no formal role in the case was seeking information from a suspect’s friend at all.She also cited earlier testimony that Cutajar had been told the exact date of Theuma’s planned arrest days before Theuma began clearing things out, and suggested he’d been formally confronted over the Brincat contacts without ever reporting it. Cutajar denied knowing the arrest date and said he had no memory of being told he’d done anything wrong.De Marco also pushed him on the contravention that first brought Brincat to him, put to him as “bait” to keep the two talking, and on a WhatsApp exchange in which Cutajar had asked Brincat about a court deferment. She argued that if he’d genuinely feared losing Theuma’s recordings, the obvious move would have been to arrest him rather than quietly ask Brincat to locate them. Cutajar said he’d judged the risk worth taking given what he stood to gain.There was also an exchange over whether Cutajar had tried to keep Keith Schembri out of the investigation. He denied ever discussing the case with him, saying their only contact was the occasional message about football.The questioning continued well into the evening. Judge Grima herself asked Cutajar whether he recalled being confronted in his office about the Brincat contacts; he said he didn’t remember.The defence then turned to Cutajar’s contact with Johann Cremona, who was a go-between between many key figures in the murder plot and a close friend of Theuma’s. Cremona’s name has repeatedly surfaced in connection with Theuma’s tapes.Cutajar said he’d spoken to Cremona only once, about an unrelated case, and denied ever calling him about Theuma.When shown a phone record placing a call between the two around the time of Theuma’s arrest, he said he had no memory of it and rejected the suggestion that he’d been relaying what Theuma had said about the recordings.He was also confronted with claims that Theuma had specifically asked for him during his police interrogation, something Cutajar denied outright, insisting he didn’t know Theuma and was never told any such request had been made, despite the defence maintaining multiple people had told them otherwise.Cutajar further denied any involvement in either Theuma’s presidential pardon or the one granted to convicted hitman Vince Muscat, known as il-Koħħu, saying he’d only sat in on Castille meetings concerning Theuma’s pardon and not Muscat’s. He said he only learned of the existence of a photo showing Theuma with Keith Schembri through media reports, and dismissed as irrelevant the defence’s claim that Theuma had initially wanted a “Nationalist lawyer.”•