TIRANA, July 6 – The trial of the accused killers of Ibrahim Basha, an officer with Albania’s elite police forces, is taking place in Tirana, two years after they were arrested in connection with the shooting in Lazarat.
This week two people who had been granted protected witness status by prosecutors reneged on their earlier testimony that fingered two brothers, Arbjon and Alban Aliko, as the shooters in an ambush against police.
Elvis Kaà§a and Klodian Selimi told the court that their previous testimony was obtained under police pressure and was not true. The reversals make++s the prosecutors’ job harder.
The court will hear from seven witnesses next, all police officers who were at the scene when Officer Basha was killed in the notorious village of Lazarat, a former drug cultivation heaven until police intervened in 2015.
The Aliko brothers surrendered after 500 police officer surrounded their hiding place the evening of June 27, 2015 after being on the run for days.
Police said the brothers had spent six months planning to attack police in Lazarat. About 15 other young men, aged between 17 to 21, were also involved in the plan, according to the police investigation. The group was very well-armed and their goal was to take control of the village and make it a safe haven for drug production and trafficking, police said.
Police added the armed gang was hoping to scare off police into leaving the village, so locals could resume planting marijuana, a multimillion-dollar business in Lazarat which was halted through a massive police operation in 2015. The police raid last year destroyed 102 tons of marijuana and 530,000 marijuana plants with an estimated value of more than half the country’s annual GDP.
The slain police officer, Ibrahim Basha, was buried with full honors the Nation’s Fallen Cemetery, an honor generally reserved for those who fall in the line of duty in the armed forces.
Basha was a veteran of the Albania’s elite commando army unit and had served in both Afghanistan and Iraq with NATO troops. He had been with the special police forces for six months when he died.
