Two men were indicted on the evening of Wednesday February 24 for complicity in the 2017 murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist who investigated corruption, a judge announced during a public hearing.
Robert Agius and Jamie Vella are believed to have supplied the bomb that detonated the car.
The two men are known to police for their links to organized crime on the island.
The two 37-year-old suspects were also indicted on Wednesday, along with two other people, for the 2015 murder of a lawyer named Carmel Chircop.
Read also: Malta: the investigation into the murder of a journalist turns into a political scandal
Journalist blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia, who denounced in her blog Running Commentary the endemic corruption in this Mediterranean archipelago, a former British colony that entered the European Union in 2004, perished in a car bomb attack on October 16, 2017. She was 53 years old.
In December 2017, three men with heavy criminal records - brothers Alfred and George Degiorgio, as well as Vincent Muscat - were arrested and charged on suspicion of having manufactured, planted and detonated the deadly bomb.
On Tuesday, Vincent Muscat suddenly pleaded guilty during a preliminary hearing, and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison by the Valletta court.
It was the first conviction in this case which had shocked Malta and the rest of the world.
It was this about-face that led to the arrest on Tuesday of Jamie Vella and Robert Agius.
They had already been arrested in December 2017, but released.
On Wednesday, they both proclaimed their innocence.
Jamie Vella, currently positive for the coronavirus, appeared in court wearing a protective suit.
Read also: Travel diary in Malta, the archipelago where order reigns
"We are able today to say that in view of the elements in our possession on the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, all the people involved - authors or accomplices - are today arrested and charged by the court"
, commented in front of the press the Commissioner of Police of Malta, Angelo Gafa.
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