Eight years for the Birżebbuġa hit-and-run

May Malimi was 17 when he was struck and left unconscious on Triq il-Ġebel in Birżebbuġa. He is now 24, studying in the UK, and he told Times of Malta that the fear has not left with the years. “I’m always scared about going out in case it happens again,” he said after the court sentenced former soldier Lorin Scicluna to eight years in prison for grievously injuring him.

That sentence matters for a reason larger than one file number. Madam Justice Natasha Galea Sciberras, according to Times of Malta, said the court wanted to warn against racial hatred when she handed it down. Malta does not often state the civic meaning of violence so plainly. Even more rarely does it do so in a case where the victim had first been missed by the system that should have found him.

Malimi’s injury was recorded at hospital as a motor vehicle accident. He spent four days there. Yet he was never questioned or contacted by the authorities until after Times of Malta interviewed him in April 2019 on the same road where he had been left, two days after Lassana Cisse was killed nearby. The newspaper reported that police only learnt of Malimi from that article and that a police report was filed afterwards.

That is the detail that lingers. A young Black man is found, in the paper’s account, “in a pool of blood” and taken for help by two Somali men. The medical trail exists. The road exists. The injury exists. But the state’s attention arrives only after publication. Malta likes to imagine its failures as dramatic acts, all sirens and declarations. Often they are administrative: a question not asked, a victim not called, a report not made until someone else does the noticing.

The jury acquitted Scicluna of the attempted murder of Malimi and of the murder of Cisse and attempted murders of Mohammed Jallow and Ibrahim Bah in April 2019. It found him guilty of grievously injuring Malimi and of using a vehicle without registration plates. Another former soldier, Francesco Fenech, faces separate proceedings, with his trial still to come, according to Times of Malta.

Malimi told the newspaper that the eight-year sentence was “better than nothing”. It is a bleak phrase, but an exact one. A prison term is a public decision; safety is a lived condition. The first has now been delivered in his case. The second plainly has not. Times of Malta also reported that none of the victims, or Cisse’s relatives, were informed that the trial was about to start. If that account is correct, Malta managed to stage one of its most sensitive racial violence trials while leaving the people marked by it outside the room until the machinery was already turning.

The scar across Malimi’s shoulder remains. So does the occasional pain running down his back. Those are bodily facts. The other consequence is harder to file and easier to spread. Regine Nguini, director of the African Media Association Malta, told Times of Malta that fear had returned within the community after the acquittal on the murder charge. Courts can only decide the charges before them. But when the state once failed even to ask a bleeding teenager what happened on a Birżebbuġa road, it should not be surprised that a sentence, by itself, does not settle the street.