At trial, race is named plainly

In court, the case was framed with unusual clarity. According to Newsbook’s report from the trial, prosecutor Abigail Caruana Vella told the jury that racial hatred was the central element: not vague prejudice, not passing hostility toward people with dark skin, but hatred that, the prosecution says, turned into violence.

That matters because Malta has spent years arguing around this case in two registers at once. One is the criminal one, with charges, evidence and a defendant who denies guilt. The other is the public one, which asks what exactly was exposed that night on Triq il-Ġebel. In the opening of the trial’s substantive phase, the Attorney General’s office did not leave that second question outside the courtroom.

The indictment against former Armed Forces of Malta soldier Lorin Scicluna is grave enough on its own terms: voluntary homicide, three counts of attempted murder, grievous and slight bodily harm, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime. Newsbook reports that the case involves four victims in total: Cisse, who was killed; Mohammed Jallow and Ibrahim Bah, who survived the alleged shooting attack; and May Malimi, whom Scicluna is accused of deliberately striking with a vehicle in a separate incident two months earlier. Scicluna, 29, denies all charges.

The prosecution’s account of the night Cisse died is precise and bleak. Cisse, a 42-year-old Ivorian, was walking alone toward Birżebbuġa, listening to music. Jallow and Bah were heading in the opposite direction after watching a football match together. Prosecutors allege that Scicluna and fellow soldier Francesco Fenech removed the registration plates from Scicluna’s Toyota Starlet before driving to Ħal Far. They allegedly spotted Cisse, waited until he had passed beneath a CCTV camera, followed him for several metres and fired three shots from inside the car with a pistol belonging to Scicluna. One bullet struck Cisse in the head and caused fatal injuries, the prosecution said.

According to the same account, the car then continued toward Birżebbuġa, where Jallow and Bah were shot at. Jallow was grievously injured and required emergency surgery; Bah suffered lighter wounds. Fenech faces separate criminal proceedings connected to the same incidents, so this jury is being asked to assess only Scicluna’s alleged responsibility.

That distinction matters. A courtroom is not there to ratify what the public has come to believe, however understandable the public reaction may be. Judge Natasha Galea Sciberras reminded jurors of the presumption of innocence, the prosecution’s burden of proof and Scicluna’s right to remain silent without that silence being treated as evidence of guilt. In a case so saturated with public meaning, those are not empty formalities.

Newsbook also reports that Scicluna allegedly admitted driving the Toyota Starlet that night but claimed Fenech fired the shots and later threatened him to keep quiet. Fenech’s defence contests that version. So even with the prosecution naming racial hatred plainly, the trial still turns on old legal disciplines: who did what, what can be proved, and what the jury is sure of.

The other fact hanging over the proceedings is the time it took to get here. Human rights groups have criticised the delay of more than seven years before the case reached trial and what that says to migrant communities. That criticism is hard to dismiss as mere impatience. Delay alters a case even when it does not erase it.

For now, the prosecution has chosen to state its theory without euphemism. A man walking alone was, it says, selected by strangers and killed. In court, that is being presented not as a senseless burst of violence but as hatred with a target.