TCNs Erase Swastikas from Bombi Underpass in Defiant Dawn Clean-Up
**Swastikas Scrubbed Clean: TCNs Remove Hate Symbols from Bombi Underpass in Act of Defiant Solidarity**
The Bombi underpass, that grimy artery linking Ħamrun to Marsa, woke up Wednesday to its usual symphony of screeching brakes and exhaust fumes—plus a fresh coat of neo-Nazi bile. Overnight, someone had scaled the concrete walls and spray-painted a parade of swastikas, SS runes and the words “WHITE POWER” in dripping black letters large enough to be legible from the traffic cameras above. By 9 a.m. the graffiti was gone, scrubbed away not by government contractors but by a crew of five third-country nationals who decided the island they clean for a living should not have to start the day with Hitler’s calling card.
“They told us to wait for Parks Malta,” said Amadou, 34, from Senegal, wringing out a bleach-soaked rag that has seen more Malta than most cruise-ship passengers. “But we start work at six. By seven the school kids pass here. We didn’t want them to see that.” Amadou and his colleagues—two Bangladeshi sanitation workers, a Ghanaian plasterer and a Filipino caregiver on her day off—spent €27 of their own money on gloves, thinner and wire brushes. At 8.47 a.m. the last swastika vanished, replaced by a faint grey smudge and the sour smell of acetone.
The underpass, officially named after 1980s roadworks minister Lorry Sant, has long doubled as an open-air diary of the nation’s id. Over the years it has hosted everything declarations of heterosexual love to “Rest in Power” tributes to Daphne Caruana Galizia. Nazi iconography is less common but not unknown: in 2019 identical symbols appeared on a Sliema bus shelter hours after a far-right rally in Valletta; they were painted over within 24 hours by a pair of Polish tourists who told Times of Malta they “didn’t want their holiday ruined by ghosts.”
Wednesday’s incident lands differently. Malta’s migrant population—now 23 % of the total—has spent the last twelve months on the front line of a heated political campaign that saw the Opposition promise mass deportations and the Prime Minister vow to “defend our ethnicity.” Hate crimes reported to the police have risen 42 % since 2022, but successful prosecutions remain in single figures. “When symbols like this appear, the message is not historical; it’s contemporary,” said Dr Isabelle Calleja, sociologist at the University of Malta. “It’s a territorial marker telling non-white residents they are temporary guests, not stakeholders.”
Ironically, the men who answered that message with Dettol and elbow grease are precisely the demographic targeted. Amadou arrived in 2012 on a fishing trawler, regularised his status during the 2020 “amnesty” scheme and now pays NI on a €950 monthly wage. His youngest daughter starts kindergarten at the Ħamrun primary school whose students stream past the underpass every morning. “I don’t want her asking me why the bad cross is on the wall,” he said. “I want her to see Malta can erase hate faster than someone can write it.”
By lunchtime the story had exploded across Maltese social media. Facebook groups normally devoted to pastizzi rankings swapped photos of the cleaned wall; the NGO Integra Foundation launched a crowdfunding page that hit €3,000 in three hours, enough to repaint the entire tunnel in bright murals celebrating Malta’s mixed heritage. Even the Nationalist Party weighed in, with spokesperson Darren Carabott condemning “cowardly nocturnal Nazis” and praising “those who rolled up their sleeves.”
Yet for Amadou, the moment was less about politics than pavement. “We didn’t do it for likes,” he laughed, loading brushes into a Kia Pride with 380,000 km on the clock. “We did it because the wall is ours too.” As rush-hour traffic resumed, commuters drove over a faint chemical scent and the ghost of a symbol that lasted barely four hours—long enough to remind Malta that hate can be sprayed in minutes, but belonging is scrubbed in years.
