From Valletta to Belfast: Why Malta Watches the Bloody Sunday Trial

Valletta’s evening news bulletins will carry a Belfast dateline this week as the landmark trial of a former British paratrooper—accused over the 1972 “Bloody Sunday” killings—opens in Northern Ireland. For many Maltese who remember their own country’s brush with British military justice during the 1950s dockyard protests, the proceedings feel less like distant history and more like an unfinished chapter we share.

Soldier F, as he is still officially known, is the only remaining defendant after the Public Prosecution Service dropped charges against a second veteran last month. He faces two murder counts and five attempted-murder charges relating to the civil-rights march in Derry’s Bogside on 30 January 1972, when British troops shot 26 unarmed civilians, killing 13 on the spot. The trial, expected to last eight weeks, will be heard by a Belfast judge without a jury—an echo of Diplock courts once used next door in Malta’s own colonial days.

Local resonance
Why should the islands care? Because Malta’s road to Republic status in 1974 was paved with similar debates over accountability and amnesty. When British soldiers opened fire on Maltese demonstrators at the Marsa power station in 1958, killing two and wounding dozens, the subsequent naval court of inquiry sat in camera. No soldier was ever named, let alone prosecuted. The parallel is not lost on historian Dr. Josephine Brincat, who teaches post-colonial law at the University of Malta. “Both cases revolve around the same question: can an imperial power investigate its own troops fairly?” she told Hot Malta. “Belfast is testing that proposition 52 years later, just as Valletta once had to.”

Cultural footprint
Walk into any Irish pub in St Julian’s on match night and you’ll hear “Sunday Bloody Sunday” belted out louder than any U2 hit. The song has become an unofficial anthem for Maltese fans of Celtic and the Irish national team, but its lyrics carry extra weight here. Malta’s own folk ballad “Ta’ Marsa,” rarely performed since the 1970s, recounts the 1958 shootings in the same lilting cadence used by Derry buskers for civil-rights laments. This week, singer-songwriter Claire Galea is reviving “Ta’ Marsa” during her set at The Pub in Valletta, dedicating it to the families still travelling back and forth to Belfast for hearings. “It’s a musical bridge,” she says. “Our islands are tied by the experience of waiting for truth.”

Community impact
The Maltese branch of the Pat Finucane Centre, a human-rights group named after the murdered Belfast solicitor, has organised a candlelight vigil outside the Anglican Pro-Cathedral on Tuesday at 7 p.m. Chairperson Mario Farrugia expects “a couple of hundred” attendees, including veterans of Malta’s 1980s peace movement who once protested NATO ships in Grand Harbour. “We’re not taking sides in a British-Irish dispute,” Farrugia insists. “We’re standing against impunity everywhere.”

Meanwhile, Qormi parish priest Fr. Ġwann Xerri has invited Bogside march organiser Kate Nash—whose brother William was killed in 1972—to address parishioners via Zoom after Sunday Mass. The link-up is part of a twinning project between St Sebastian’s church and St Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry that began during the pandemic. “Our congregations swapped recipes for soda bread and ftira,” laughs Xerri, “but now we’re swapping something heavier: the weight of historical grief.”

Political ripples
Government House in San Anton Palace is watching too. A spokesperson for Foreign & European Affairs Minister Ian Borg confirmed Malta will observe the trial as an EU member state with “a strong interest in transitional-justice mechanisms.” Diplomats note that the outcome could influence how the EU frames future guidelines on legacy prosecutions—guidelines that might one day apply to Mediterranean conflicts closer to home, from Libya to Syria.

Conclusion
Whether Soldier F is convicted, acquitted or the case collapses on evidential grounds, the Belfast courtroom will deliver more than a legal verdict. For Maltese citizens still waiting for full disclosure of 1950s military files, the process is a live tutorial in how small nations can, or cannot, hold larger powers to account. As the Belfast judge raises his gavel, Valletta’s own ghosts stir, reminding us that justice delayed may be justice denied—but it is never justice forgotten.