Jury clears Scicluna in Cisse case

A jury has found former soldier Lorin Scicluna not guilty of murdering Lassana Cisse, the Ivorian father of two who was shot along Triq il-Ġebel on 6 April 2019 after leaving a football match.

The 8-1 verdict, reported by Times of Malta and cited by Lovin Malta, also acquitted Scicluna on the attempted murder charges connected to three other men. The decision ends one part of a case that has sat heavily on Malta for more than seven years, not only because a man was killed on a dark road between Ħal Far and Birżebbuġa, but because the prosecution had presented it as racial hatred turned lethal.

That allegation remains an allegation the jury did not convert into guilt against Scicluna. The distinction matters. Trials are not public mood by other means; they are tests of whether the evidence against a particular defendant reaches the criminal standard.

Scicluna’s own account carried its own grim detail. He maintained throughout the trial that the shots were fired by fellow former soldier Francesco Fenech, while admitting he had been driving the car. He also admitted, according to Lovin Malta’s account of the proceedings, that the pair had driven around Ħal Far looking for Black people to harass. That admission describes a public ugliness plainly enough. It did not, on the jury’s view, prove beyond reasonable doubt that Scicluna was the gunman in Cisse’s killing.

The prosecution had pointed to changing statements during police questioning, the use of Scicluna’s car and a firearm found under his bed. The defence argued that those elements still fell short of proving murder. The jury accepted that argument.

So one concrete thing has happened in Malta’s justice system: a man charged with one of the country’s most notorious killings has been acquitted. Another concrete thing remains: Francesco Fenech still faces separate criminal proceedings in connection with the case.

That leaves Cisse’s death in a hard place familiar to this island’s courts but no easier for it. A killing that provoked national outrage, and reopened arguments about racism and the treatment of migrants, has not yet produced a murder conviction against the man who sat in the dock for it. Public debate can say what this case symbolised. The jury was asked a narrower question, about one defendant and one threshold of proof.

The difference is unsatisfying, especially in a case that entered Maltese public life as more than a file number. But it is the difference on which criminal verdicts turn. A road in Ħal Far, a father walking home, a car carrying two soldiers, and an 8-1 vote: those are the facts left standing after this trial. Who fired the fatal shots is still not settled in a final way by this verdict.