Former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has reacted to Yorgen Fenech’s acquittal by calling for the jury’s verdict to be respected and saying he intends to speak publicly in the coming days about matters he has held back on for the past six years.Muscat said he plans to “remove the gravel from his shoe”, reviving a phrase long associated with him and the political crisis surrounding the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder investigation.The expression was already well known enough by December 2020 for the board conducting the public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s assassination to ask Muscat directly about his “famous gravel in the shoe”. He declined to explain it at the time, saying instead that he still had more gravel to remove and joking that otherwise there would be nothing left for the book he wanted to write.In his latest statement, Muscat said that after six years of exercising restraint out of respect for the institutions, he now intends to speak and will also take questions from journalists.His intervention follows the acquittal of Fenech, who was cleared by an eight-to-one jury verdict of complicity in Caruana Galizia’s murder and of associating with others to commit a crime.Muscat was prime minister when Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bomb in October 2017, and the murder investigation later raised serious questions about people operating at the heart of his administration.His former chief of staff, Keith Schembri, featured repeatedly in evidence heard during Fenech’s trial. The court heard allegations that information from the murder investigation was being passed to Fenech, including information linked to police activity and the people being investigated.Schembri was also a close friend of Fenech and was questioned by police after Fenech’s arrest in November 2019. Muscat announced his resignation as prime minister during the political crisis that followed.Muscat himself had been included on a list of possible witnesses the defence could call during Fenech’s trial, although he was ultimately not summoned to testify.Against that background, Muscat said people remained free to agree or disagree with the jury’s verdict, but argued that respecting the course of justice was fundamental to the rule of law.He said that from the beginning of the investigation, including while he was still prime minister, it had been demonstrated that no one was protected or immune from justice.Muscat also defended investigators and prosecutors, saying they had been allowed to work freely and had been given all the tools they requested. He referred specifically to the presidential pardon granted to Melvin Theuma, which followed a written recommendation from the police and Attorney General.He noted that Caruana Galizia’s family had thanked investigators and prosecutors following the trial, despite the many issues on which he and the family had disagreed over the years.Muscat also said that any further investigations arising from the case should proceed without reservation or delay.He then returned to the timing of the public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s assassination, arguing that he had originally believed it should be held after the criminal trial so that it could take account of all the evidence that eventually emerged.Muscat said he was ultimately persuaded to establish the inquiry earlier because delaying it risked creating the impression that there was no intention to hold one.He now argues that it would have been wiser for the inquiry to take place after the trial, saying it would then have been able to assess the full body of evidence rather than reach conclusions based on assumptions that, in his view, may now sit uneasily with the jury’s verdict.His promise to revisit the “gravel in his shoe” suggests that at least part of his forthcoming intervention will concern questions and allegations that have followed him since the investigation reached members of his former administration.•