Nine years ago, Daphne Caruana Galizia, Malta’s foremost investigative journalist, was assassinated by a car bomb outside her home. The men who carried out the killing have been convicted or admitted their involvement. Nobody has been convicted of commissioning her murder.

Last week, a jury acquitted Yorgen Fenech, one of Malta’s most prominent businessmen, of complicity in the assassination and criminal association.

We have followed this case from different places: one of us from Malta, as a journalist and civil society activist campaigning for accountability after Daphne’s assassination; the other served as the Council of Europe’s rapporteur scrutinising the investigation and Malta’s failures of the rule of law.

We were shocked by the verdict, but we respect it.

The jurors decided, by eight votes to one, that Fenech’s guilt had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. We are not asking for their verdict to be disregarded or reversed by political pressure.

But the verdict does not erase what the trial exposed.

Fenech admitted that he knew of the murder plan before Daphne was killed and that, while the plan was still live, he gave €50,000 to Melvin Theuma, the middleman who recruited the killers. Fenech said the money was intended to reimburse Theuma for money already paid and to persuade him to stop the assassination. He also admitted he passed confidential information about the police investigation to Theuma and gave him further sums of money. He told the court he was blackmailed by Theuma.

But Fenech denied commissioning or financing the murder. His explanation was that he had been acting out of misplaced loyalty to Keith Schembri, then chief of staff to Malta’s prime........

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