In her last blog post, published the day she died, Daphne Caruana Galizia signed off with a sentence that seems particularly chilling now.

"There are crooks everywhere you look. The situation is desperate."

Caruana Galizia, 53, felt she had good reason to feel pessimistic about Malta, and her enemies had good reason to fear her. Someone, it seems, was worried enough to want her silenced.

In that last post, which appeared just before a bomb blew up the car she was driving, Caruana Galizia had taken aim, and not for the first time, at Maltese politicians. But they were far from the only people in the firing line.