‘All busy’: How Bidnija’s latest shooting exposed Malta’s rural policing crisis

**“All busy”: Wardens’ frantic radio calls lay bare Bidnija’s darkest hour**

The pine-scented lanes of Bidnija were supposed to echo with nothing louder than farm dogs and the clink of horse bridles last Sunday morning. Instead, at 06:17, two local wardens parked near the village’s honey-coloured chapel stared at a motionless figure on the tarmac and heard the same crackling reply every time they pressed the radio: “All units busy.”
In those three words lies a chilling snapshot of rural Malta when violence collides with geography: a hamlet of 250 souls, one winding road in, and a police force stretched thinner than the dry-stone walls that stripe the surrounding fields.

Bidnija – pronounced “bid-NEE-ya” – has always occupied an outsized place in the Maltese imagination. Tucked under the shadow of the Victoria Lines, it is the island’s last pocket where you can still buy rabbit stew from a farmhouse doorbell and hear gunshots that are (usually) just hunters zeroing-in before the season. The hamlet’s name is synonymous with rustic Sunday lunches and with the 2013 car-bomb that claimed journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia a kilometre down the road. Now, a fresh killing has scratched open a communal wound that many hoped had healed.

According to an internal log seen by Hot Malta, the wardens arrived within four minutes of reports of “tyres screeching” near the chapel. Finding 42-year-old labourer Mario “Il-Bjond” Farrugia face-down in a pool of blood, they followed protocol: cordon the scene, preserve tyre marks, call for backup. Yet between 06:18 and 06:41 they repeated the call six times, only to be told every district car was either guarding a cash-in-transit delivery in Valletta, managing a separate stabbing in Paceville, or “on break” after overnight overtime. When reinforcements finally rolled in from Mosta, 19 minutes later, locals had already begun lighting candles at the chapel’s feet – a Mediterranean gesture of defiance against fate as much as grief.

The delay has ignited a national debate about policing numbers that feels louder than the village’s annual feast firework. Malta has 2.2 officers per 1,000 residents, the EU’s second-lowest ratio; the rural northern region, covering Bidnija, has just one car for 22 square kilometres after midnight. “We feel like we’re on the moon,” sheep farmer Ċikku Vella told Hot Malta, gesturing at the limestone cliffs. “Pretty, yes; protected, no.”

Culturally, the chapel of the Immaculate Conception is more than a landmark; it is Bidnija’s living room. Elderly men still play briscola on its stone steps; teenagers sneak first kisses behind the cypress trees. That a shooting happened metres from where babies are baptised feels, to residents, like a desecration. By Monday morning someone had painted “Mhux se nibżgħu” (“We won’t be scared”) across the chapel wall – a direct echo of graffiti that appeared after Caruana Galizia’s murder. The slogan captures the stubborn pride of Maltese farming communities: we have survived Phoenicians, Turks, Nazis; we will outlast this too.

Yet beneath the bravado, fear is reshaping routines. Gozitan florist Marisol Xuereb, who drives through Bidnija every dawn to supply Valletta market, now waits for her husband to tailgate her van. “We joke it’s a convoy, like in Iraq,” she laughs nervously. Restaurant bookings at the village’s famed rabbit joints are down 30 % this week; tourists on quad bikes whisper about “the mafia” and speed away. Even hunters – normally the most vocal champions of village freedom – have voluntarily suspended this Sunday’s shoot, fearing armed strangers could hide amid the foliage.

Opposition MPs have seized on the wardens’ logs to demand an inquiry; government sources counter that rural CCTV is being upgraded and a new beat system will put foot patrols in “satellite hamlets” by 2025. But in Bidnija, patience is wearing thinner than the village’s single tarmac strip. “We don’t need cameras, we need bodies,”insists parish priest Fr. Joe Borg, who buried Farrugia on Wednesday. “When the shepherd is late, the wolves remember they are wolves.”

For now, the candles outside the chapel burn longer each night, their wax pooling like unanswered calls on a warden’s radio. Locals swear the bells will still toll for Sunday mass, the rabbits will still simmer in wine, and the fields will still smell of wild thyme. Whether Malta’s smallest village can remain its safest is the question hanging heavier than the summer haze – and it is one the island cannot afford to leave on hold.