By Nigel Ash.
Tripoli, 14 October 2013:
Malta’s foreign ministry ordered its consul in Benghazi to quit the city, after what it described . . .[restrict]as a “credible threat” to his safety.
The consul Joe Pirotta and his wife flew out of the city for Malta on Saturday, the day before Maltese premier Joseph Muscat came to Tripoli for talks with prime minister Ali Zeidan.
Pirotta told the Libya Herald this evening that he had left Libya with great sadness after five years, more than two of which have been in Benghazi. He arrived in the first week of August 2011 and helped set up the Maltese consulate in the Tibesti Hotel where it remains today.
“ I was a bit surprised to hear of the warning,” he said, “though of course last week we had the attack on the Swedish-Finnish consulate and three months ago, the assault on the honorary French consul… we are seeing the situation getting a bit out of hand.”
He said that what happened next was up to the Maltese foreign ministry. “My feeling is that we will not close the consulate. We were doing quite well. We issued between 500 and 700 visas a month. Without a consul visas cannot be processed. Maybe someone else will go there”. Pirotta said he did not think that the threats made against him had anything to do with delays in issuing visas, a problem that Zeidan took up with Muscat during their talks yesterday at Tripoli’s Corinthia Hotel.
Mannie Gallea, Malta’s new ambassador in Libya told this newspaper: “It is a great pity. Like the late US ambassador Chris Stevens, Joe Pirotta was very close to the Libyans. He was there during the revolution and for three years, he never stopped”.
Gallea said that the future of the Benghazi consulate had yet to be decided. “We are going to try and see a way forward tomorrow. We are continuing to give a service to the Maltese community through the Tripoli embassy. We would like to continue as a bridge between Europe and Libya, but it depends on the situation”. [/restrict]
