Daphne Caruana Galizia’s ‘brigade’ tried to hack my website in an attempt to stop me from continuing to publish
On Friday, Manuel Delia uploaded an article to counter argue my views about the false narrative the police are desperately trying to build that Yorgen Fenech tried to escape from Malta. To prove his point, Manuel Delia mentioned the testimony given by Arnaud in court regarding the arrangements – supposedly being made by Yorgen Fenech – to escape to France. This argument does not hold water.
First and foremost Yorgen Fenech was just returning from France. If he wanted to escape to France, he could very easily have stayed there. Then, there is another hitch in Arnaud’s evidence. Arnaud states that the plan was to escape by plane. Yorgen Fenech was on his way to Sicily by boat when he was arrested while exiting Portomaso. According to the media reports, Arnaud said that this plan did not go through because someone, with the initials of K told him that it was not safe. But then, if all this is true, why did not Arnaud try to identify who K is? And if K is Keith Schembri, why did Arnaud fail to recover his mobile phone? If all this is true, Keith Schembri’s mobile should have all the messages and even more about the alleged plan of Yorgen Fenech to escape from Malta. It is unbelievable that the police failed to lay their hands on such an important piece of evidence.
In reality, Delia’s article was to state that I am Yorgen Fenech’s minion and, with my writings, I am going against Magistrate Montebello’s court order and instructions to the media. I wish to remind Manuel Delia, that I am not a court reporter. I basically analyze and comment on what the media carries.
What, however, I did appreciate in Delia’s article is his reference to the fact that I am writing in English. It seems that this is unnerving him. He believes there is a ghost writer, but I can assure him that the writings are mine. Until recently, it is true I was holding back in writing but I soon realized that in order to get to an even wider readership it was imperative to also write in English. After all we are bilingual on the island, like so many other states in the world, but more importantly, I am also using English to avoid any mistranslations and/or misinterpretations of my Maltese texts. Henceforth, I shall be writing both in English and Maltese so that even the foreign media can have another view of certain events being reported in a non-apolitical manner. My views are the complete antithesis of what Delia and his cronies want to portray.
Not happy with spreading false rumours about me, the latest move has been to attempt to hack my system so that my views are not on the web! I can reveal that this was the second attempt. The first attempt was through the use of an article that Kevin Cassar wrote against me in Shift News portal but I did not upload it because I realised that it was not a comment. This time round, hackers sought to use another article, this time written by Manuel Delia. Last Friday, on my website, simonmercieca.com, I received Manuel Delia’s entire article, which I mistakenly took for a comment and uploaded. The moment I did so, I realised it was a hacking attempt. Luckily, I managed to foil the hackers in the nick of time. They only succeeded in tempering with one file, removing the “s” from the URL address so that the reader could not access the article from Facebook as can be seen from the image below.
This is how democratic the Daphne Caruana Galizia ‘brigade’ is, and how much it respects democracy and freedom of speech when it concerns or upsets its agenda. It tries to hack those platforms that publish material with which they disagree. It also tried to use phishing to access my email address because I received the comment, which was sent as a bait to hack my system, via email.
To crown matters, this brigade has the support of those European structures that preach about liberty, rule of law and free speech. No wonder there are signs of fissures appearing in the Union.