The conclusion of the longest-running murder trial in Maltese history has left a country in turmoil, and a grieving family still searching for answers.

At 7.30pm on Wednesday, gasps and cheers echoed around hall 22 of the courts of justice in Valletta, as a jury pronounced a businessman accused of ordering the murder of the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia not guilty.

Yorgen Fenech, 44, had been facing a life sentence if convicted. Now, after nearly seven years in and out of custody, he is free to return to a gilded life as the heir to one of Malta’s biggest fortunes.

In her reporting, Caruana Galizia had taken aim at many powerful figures, including Fenech and the politicians he was close to. Her revelations, and the fallout from her violent death in a car bombing in October 2017, had ultimately led to the resignation of the prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and several members of his government.

Within weeks, three hitmen accused of planting the bomb were arrested. Two were sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to murder, while the third was given a reduced 15-year sentence in exchange for evidence against his accomplices.

After Wednesday’s decision, the long search for whoever was responsible for hiring them must begin again.

The opposition leader, Alex Borg, has demanded the recall of parliament from its summer recess, and called for the government to act to strengthen press protection and anti-corruption measures. “We believe journalism is the backbone of a democracy,” he told the Guardian, describing the failure to find the culprits as a black mark against the Labour government. The party has been in power since 2013.

Caruana Galizia’s family described the verdict as “justice denied”.

The attorney general is considering whether to appeal for a retrial. The chances of success may be slim: Both charges brought against Fenech were dismissed by an 8-1 majority.

It had taken nine years, a relentless family campaign and a determined judge to bring Fenech before a jury. In the end, they took him at his word. During his evidence, he was adamant: “I never ordered Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, or anyone else’s. I had no role in her murder.”

While the identity of the mastermind remains a mystery, what the trial did reveal was the full extent of the challenges faced by those leading the search for Daphne’s killers.

Witness after witness spoke of attempts to block and sabotage the murder investigation. As detectives worked to identify all of those involved, from the bomb makers to the hitmen to their ultimate client, they heard evidence that the most sensitive details were being leaked. Most disturbingly of all, the jury was told much of the information was coming from the prime minister’s right-hand man.

“Don’t worry about me, nobody can touch me,” Fenech was heard saying in secret recordings that formed a cornerstone of the case against him, and played to the jury.

The man who had made those recordings was a taxi driver, Melvin Theuma, who testified to acting as the middleman between Fenech and the bombers. He was the key prosecution witness, having secured a pardon two years after the murder in return for giving evidence.

In July 2020, he was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Overcome with remorse, he had attempted suicide while staying at a safe house, and it took intensive support to get him back in the stand.

What follows is the story of the search for those responsible, based on pre-trial hearings, the trial itself, and related court cases.

Consumed by an investigation that would kill her

In the last summer of her life, Caruana Galizia was deeply isolated.

As a younger woman, she had not only been brilliant, but strikingly beautiful, with big statement earrings and shining black hair. She had co-founded a national newspaper, was a lifestyle magazine publisher, and had become one of Malta’s most-read columnists, all while raising three sons.

In later life, it was the investigative work that consumed her. Her blog Running Commentary was among the most-read news sites in Malta, but its popularity, and her often scathing satires of public figures, made her a target. She had as many detractors as fans, and on social media she was vilified as a “witch”. There were arson attacks, and the family dogs were killed. “I was worried about her,” her middle son, Andrew, told the trial. “The atmosphere around her was horrible. People would stare at her in Valletta. She wouldn’t leave the house.”

Caruana Galizia knew she was at risk and had already started varying her routine. For added security, she drove a rental car.

It was in that car that she died on 16 October 2017, aged 53, metres from her house. A bomb placed under the driver’s seat ripped through the vehicle, scattering burning remains across the road and into a field.

Barricaded inside their home, sheltering from the media storm, Daphne’s sons and her widow, Peter, wondered who they could trust. They felt sure her work would hold clues, but also that they could not hand sensitive source material to the police. Her eldest son, Matthew, a software engineer who had been part of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer prize for the Panama Papers, a giant leak of offshore company data, suggested contacting journalists outside Malta.

“I didn’t have the resources to do the investigation on my own,” he told the jury at Fenech’s trial.

He reached out to the Guardian, which joined Reuters, the non-profit Forbidden Stories and others to form the Daphne Project.

Before her death, Caruana Galizia had published a series of stories that plunged the Maltese government into scandal. She had found evidence in the Panama Papers that the energy minister, Konrad Mizzi, and the prime minister’s chief of staff, a businessman turned political fixer called Keith Schembri, had set up offshore companies held via anonymous trusts. Posts she published, read out during the trial, suggested she thought they were planning to use these to receive kickbacks.

Those allegations are now the subject of a criminal case, in which Fenech, Schembri, Mizzi and others are pleading not guilty to corruption, trading in influence and criminal association.

At the time she died, Caruana Galizia was receiving a leak of information about a large government contract – a concession to build a €500m gas power plant that would supply electricity for the national grid. The leak came from the servers of the company building the plant, Electrogas. One of its shareholders was Fenech, and the email traffic suggested he was a driving force, handling communications with the government, and the refinancing of a crucial bank loan.

The jury heard how, in her blog, Caruana Galizia had described the venture as a “magic new corruption power station”.

The prosecution had claimed, in its closing submissions, that Fenech’s motive for ordering her murder was to prevent any further revelations.

The Electrogas data was shared with the Daphne Project. As reporters combed the files, following the money trails, Keith Arnaud, a homicide detective, searched for the killers. At first he made rapid progress, thanks to the FBI. The agency’s cellphone analysis team had been in Europe when the bomb went off, and they diverted to Malta, landing there within hours.

The hitmen, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, and their accomplice Vincent Muscat, had used burner phones but they had been careless, often carrying them alongside their usual mobiles. The FBI made the link, tracing a text message sent by George to detonate the bomb. In December 2017, the trio were arrested.

In April 2018, Vincent Muscat told police he was ready to turn on his accomplices, in exchange for a shorter sentence. While the hitmen had never known the identity of their ultimate client, Muscat had the name of the middleman: Melvin Theuma.

The mosquito and the lion

For Theuma, a fatherless teenager, the Malta Racing Club was a home from home. He started as a groom, tending to the ponies that pull small carts around the bare-earth track. Before long he was working as a scout for a bookmaker. The old betting shop still stands across the street from the Fenech family stables.

Theuma and Fenech became friends, but it was not a relationship of equals. As the taxi driver said in court: “I was hanging out with a lion, and I’m a mosquito.”

Police said in court they had identified Fenech as a suspect by September 2018. But it would take until February 2019 for a warrant to be authorised to intercept his calls.

The person signing the warrants was the prime minister, Joseph Muscat. From the beginning, Muscat had been receiving updates about the investigation directly from Arnaud and his colleagues. That decision was controversial because, along with his ministers, he had been one of the main subjects of Caruana Galizia’s reporting.

Muscat has indicated it was customary for the prime minister to sign warrants in cases of national importance. He has previously said he fulfilled his duties “without fear, prejudice or favour”. In a statement on Thursday, he said that from the beginning, and while he was still in office, “no one was protected from or immune to justice”.

Schembri was allowed to attend the police briefings and told the trial he was kept informed throughout.

The two men were close – Schembri had started out as Muscat’s campaign manager – but Schembri had another good friend: Fenech. They had played football together as children, and when Fenech, a few years younger, stepped up to run his family business, Schembri had mentored him. They would often holiday together and gather for family events.

Schembri is accused of repeatedly leaking sensitive details about the homicide investigation to Fenech. He denies the allegations, and is being prosecuted over the matter in a separate criminal case.

During his trial, Fenech sought to paint Schembri as the ultimate mastermind, describing himself as a go-between, passing messages to Theuma. Fenech’s lawyers depicted the taxi driver as a blackmailer and a liar, and accused the police of framing Fenech because they had failed to properly follow other leads. They said the searches at Schembri’s home and his office had been bungled. His phone, active 28 minutes before the raid, was never found.

“All roads lead to Keith and all bridges leading to Keith were burnt,” Fenech’s lawyer said. “And so a bridge had to be built to Yorgen Fenech.”

Schembri denies any involvement in the murder. In their evidence, police said he was never a murder suspect.

Under questioning, Fenech admitted paying €400,000, via Theuma, to the hitmen to cover their legal bills. He said this was to keep Theuma calm, and that the cab driver “drained” him of money. He also admitted giving Theuma money before the murder, but said he warned that it should not go ahead, telling the taxi driver to “stop it here”.

He admitted passing information about the police investigation from Schembri to Theuma, starting soon after the assassination.

“Keith Schembri was continuously informed and in a way you can say real time,” Fenech told a court in 2019, in a constitutional case regarding his right to a fair trial. “The information was passed to me by Keith Schembri but it came from Mr Arnaud, and he used to tell me that it came from Mr Arnaud.”

Recordings, messages and testimony from Fenech himself indicate that in the first months after the murder he had passed on to Theuma the identity of who had made the bomb and the date on which the police were planning to arrest the hitmen. When the police raided their shed by the docks, they had already thrown their mobile phones into the water, and one of them had written his wife’s number on his wrist.

In April 2018, Fenech also shared that Vincent Muscat was offering to become a witness for the prosecution. The news sent Theuma into a spin and he started to record his exchanges with Fenech, using a spare phone switched to airplane mode so it would not ring.

It was around this time that Arnaud’s investigation seemed to lose momentum. Eventually, details of what had been uncovered began to leak. By May 2019, reporters had Theuma’s name.

Europol, which had been supporting Arnaud and his team, threatened over the summer of 2019 to withdraw unless arrests were made. The family were also losing patience. “We had known what was being alleged about Melvin Theuma for months,” Matthew Caruana Galizia has said. “And it reached a point where I just wanted to go into the street and spraypaint his name on a wall. I wanted the world to know that he was the middleman, to just push the police into action.”

While the walls around the prime minister and his friends looked strong from the outside, when the police finally went for Theuma, Joseph Muscat’s administration crumbled.

Theuma had been warned of his planned arrest date but police swooped two days early, on 14 November 2019. Fenech had urged him in messages beforehand to dispose of the evidence. The jury saw one message in which he said: “Be 100% sure everywhere is clean.”

But Theuma held on to his recordings. On 19 November, the prime minister signed a memorandum guaranteeing Theuma immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony. Within hours, Fenech was making preparations to flee, messages seen by the jury suggest. “Go while you’re still in time,” his uncle texted. He planned to sail to Sicily, and then head for France. However, the police had been tipped off. His yacht was intercepted a mile off the coast, and he was arrested. The interrogation tapes, played at his trial, showed he offered to implicate Schembri in return for a pardon.

As Fenech talked, heads rolled. Schembri was arrested in relation to the suspected leaks, and resigned. The economy minister, a frequent subject of Caruana Galizia’s blog, suspended himself and Mizzi, by now reassigned from energy to tourism minister, quit, citing “political, extraordinary and general circumstances in the country”.

Public outrage brought hundreds on to the streets, filling the grand plaza outside the prime minister’s office, chanting: “Mafia, mafia”.

Fenech’s pardon request was rejected and on 30 November, he was charged. Two days later, Joseph Muscat resigned. Defiant to the end, he insisted: “This case cannot define everything that our country is.”

The saga is once again drawing attention from outside Malta. Shami Chakrabarti, the British Labour peer, has been appointed rapporteur of a Council of Europe investigation into the Maltese government’s response to the murder. Caruana Galizia’s family members intend to give evidence at the first hearing next week.

“The failure to ensure individual accountability for the murder risks perpetuating a culture of impunity,” Chakrabarti said on Thursday. “A culture where … those who try to shine a light in the darkness pay the ultimate price.”