Maximilian Ciantar, a young Maltese man with a list of charges and prison sentences going back over 15 years, has been acquitted of being in possession of a knuckleduster at the Mater Dei Hospital, after the main witness in the case failed to be summoned by prosecutors. The carer who allegedly say Ciantar “acting illegally” at Mater Dei (including taking drugs) was never called to testify, with prosecutors instead calling on two witnesses who described what that carer had told them. And while the knuckleduster was indeed found in a cupboard, the police’s failure to prove the weapon was Ciantar’s – and a further failure to read him his rights while questioning him – led Magistrate Yana Micallef Stafrace to acquit him. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lovin Malta (@lovinmalta)Ciantar has been making headlines for well over a decade.In 2010, when he was just 20 years old, he ran over two 10-year-old twin sisters at a zebra crossing in Attard while driving at 102 km/hr. He was initially jailed for two years and banned from driving for 10 years, but the ban was later reduced to six months on appeal. In 2012, he was jailed for a month and fined €100 for threatening journalists who reported on his court case. In 2013, he crashed his mother’s car into another car just metres away from his home, resulting in an aggressive argument with the car’s owner which led to him nearly running her over. He was later sentenced to nine months in prison… but when it was found that the legal process required to enforce his legal suspension had not been completed by Transport Malta, he was cleared of charges relating to driving while without a licence, reducing his jail term from nine months to four. On Easter Sunday of 2016, he was accused of breaking into a Dingli farmhouse with a knife alongside his teenage friend to steal cash from a farmer and his wife while they were milking cows. Ciantar had called the whole thing a “stupidity” and an “adventure” which he would never repeat… and was handed nine months in jail.In 2019, Ciantar got another one-year sentence for falsely claiming to be the victim of police brutality. But the court also criticised the prosecution for having used the wrong date on one of the charges, leading to Ciantar being acquitted of the charge of having fabricated evidence.Ciantar has previously told the court that he’s “the unluckiest person in the world”.What do you make of this latest case?•