The reports appeared almost simultaneously and in near identical language. Among the outlets that published or amplified the claim were INA - Iliria News Agency, Veriu.info, Llapi.info, Gazeta Journal, KosovaPost.net1, Kosova ime and Realiteti, alongside a number of widely shared Facebook pages including DPT te Fidani2. Each version of the story asserted that a senior American intelligence official had been present at the 28th anniversary of the Epopeja e Dukagjinit, a historically significant commemoration marking clashes between the Kosovo Liberation Army and Serbian forces in the late 1990s.

The framing was consistent. The presence of this alleged official was described as lending symbolic weight to the ceremony. Several reports cited a video3 said to show the individual being received by Haradinaj. Others referenced secondary sources, most notably a report attributed to Periskopi, which itself appeared to rely on footage initially published by Indeksonline. In each iteration, the claim was presented as fact, without attribution to any verifiable official source.

We began examining the origin of the claim by tracing its earliest identifiable publication. The trail led to a report published by Zhurnal.mk at 21.35 on March 24. The article stated4 that “chief of the CIA for the Balkans” had been present in Gllogjan and had been received by Haradinaj. It cited video material and referenced other outlets but did not provide any independent confirmation, official statement or identifiable source supporting the assertion that the individual was affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency.

From there, the claim propagated rapidly. Multiple Kosovo based outlets reproduced the same narrative, often verbatim, without additional verification. In several cases, the wording, structure and sequence of facts remained unchanged, indicating a copy chain rather than independent reporting. Social media amplification followed, with captions and graphics reinforcing the claim in simplified, declarative terms.

We reviewed the visual material accompanying these reports. The footage and images show Haradinaj speaking with a man in casual attire, at times in conversation and at times standing alongside him during the gathering. At no point in the available material is the individual formally introduced by name, title or institutional affiliation. No insignia, credentials or contextual indicators support the claim that he represents any branch of the United States intelligence community.

The assertion itself raises immediate structural concerns. There is no publicly recognised position within the Central Intelligence Agency described as a “chief for the Balkans”. The CIA operates under a highly centralised leadership structure headed by a single Director, a position publicly known and appointed by the President of the United States. Operational roles within the agency, particularly those related to geographic regions, are not publicly disclosed. Officers do not identify themselves in open settings, nor do they participate in public political gatherings where their affiliation would be declared or visually documented.

To verify the claim, we contacted sources in Washington with direct familiarity with United States government structures and intelligence protocols. They were unequivocal.

“The man shown in the images is not CIA,” one source told . “There is no record, no knowledge of this individual having worked within the agency or within the State Department. The claim is false.”

We sought further clarification on whether any CIA official could appear in the manner described by the reports. The response was categorical.

“There is no construct of the CIA outside the United States in the way it is being presented,” the source said. “There is no publicly designated CIA chief for any region, including the Balkans. CIA personnel do not identify themselves publicly, do not attend political events in that capacity and do not pose for media. If they are present anywhere operationally, it is covert. What is being claimed here contradicts the most basic protocols of the agency.”

A separate source in Europe, also familiar with transatlantic security structures, addressed a related claim repeated in several of the reports, that Haradinaj had cooperated with the CIA during the Kosovo war.

“The claim that Ramush Haradinaj cooperated with the CIA during the war is not grounded in verified evidence,” the source said. “What is being presented now builds on that narrative, but it does not hold. Bringing a person from the United States and presenting them as CIA in a public setting is not just inaccurate, it is misleading. No CIA officer would participate in such a display. It would be against protocol and against the legal framework governing their conduct.”

We then contacted the office of Ramush Haradinaj on March 275, addressing our inquiry to the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. We asked directly whether the individual in question was accurately identified as a CIA representative, what his identity was and in what capacity he had attended the event. We also asked whether the political party or its representatives had been the original source of the information that spread across media platforms.

We received no response.

We subsequently contacted Besnik Tahiri, a member of parliament and a close associate of Haradinaj, providing the same questions and forwarding our original request. Again, there was no reply.

In parallel, we reached out to several of the media outlets that had published the claim, asking them to clarify the basis of their reporting, their sources and whether any independent verification had been conducted. Only one responded. INA - Iliria News Agency confirmed to us that it had removed its article6 after determining that the information was not credible.

“We deleted it after verifying that it was not a reliable report,” said Naser Pajaziti of INA. “The news had been taken from Zhurnal.mk and had been carried by other Kosovo media such as Insajder and Periskopi.”

Despite this, the original article on Zhurnal.mk remained accessible at the time of this publication, continuing to present the claim without correction or clarification.

We attempted to locate the purported original report from Periskopi, which had been cited as a source by several outlets. The post appears to have been removed, and no archived version of the article or social media post was available at the time of our review. This absence complicates the reconstruction of the claim’s initial transmission, but the pattern of replication suggests that Periskopi may have served as a key node in its early dissemination.

What emerges from this sequence is not an isolated error but a systemic failure of verification. A claim of significant geopolitical sensitivity, involving a major United States intelligence agency, was published and republished across multiple platforms without a single attributable, verifiable source. The repetition of identical language indicates that editorial judgement was subordinated to speed and amplification.

The claim itself collapses under minimal scrutiny.

• There is no such publicly acknowledged position as “chief of the CIA for the Balkans”.

• There is no precedent for CIA officials appearing openly in politically affiliated commemorations.

• There is no evidence that the individual depicted has any affiliation with the agency or with the United States government.

What remains is a constructed narrative, one that moved rapidly through a fragmented media environment, gaining perceived legitimacy through repetition rather than verification. By the time corrections began to appear, the claim had already reached a wide audience, reinforced by imagery and declarative headlines.

In the absence of transparency from the political actors present at the event and in the absence of accountability from the majority of outlets that carried the claim, the burden of verification rests on independent scrutiny. Based on all available evidence, the assertion that a “CIA chief for the Balkans” attended the gathering in Gllogjan on March 24, 2026 is false.

The Man They Called a CIA Chief Was Not CIA

Following the circulation of claims that a “CIA chief for the Balkans” had appeared alongside Ramush Haradinaj in Gllogjan, we initiated a verification process to establish the identity of the individual in question.

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In the account shared with us, a person claiming familiarity with American official thinking described Richard Grenell as a man no longer trusted by Donald Trump, portrayed Hashim Thaçi as a political client of the American Democratic establishment, and insisted that Trump had never forgotten who had once embraced Kosovo’s former president. The source spoke of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, old enmities, White House memory, Serbian lobbying, Albania’s interventions, and a battle over the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. Yet the source offered no documents, no corroborating records, and no proof that could be published as evidence. What it offered, instead, was a map of suspicion.

Taken on its own, that map could not bear much weight. Anonymous sourcing is sometimes the beginning of reporting. It is never the end of it. So the question was not whether to believe the source wholesale. The question was whether the public record, laid out carefully and chronologically, supported any part of the underlying argument.

It does, though not in the way the source imagined, and not in the way many of Thaçi’s loudest defenders now present it.

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Over the past three weeks, President Vjosa Osmani has moved to the centre of a widening political and constitutional storm. What began as renewed scrutiny of her relationship with Prime Minister Edi Rama of Albania, and questions about sensitive information exposed in public, has now deepened into a broader confrontation over her conduct in office, her political positioning ahead of a possible second mandate, and the legality of her most consequential recent act, the dissolution of Kosovo’s parliament on March 61.

At the heart of this moment lies a difficult and delicate question. Is President Osmani acting as a constitutional guardian navigating a fractured political order, or as a political actor using the authority of the presidency to preserve her own relevance in a rapidly changing landscape.

There is, at present, no publicly available evidence proving the most serious allegations circulating in western political and intelligence circles. There is no documentary proof in the public domain of any secret pact involving Ms Osmani and Mr Rama. There is no published evidence confirming that she has coordinated with foreign or domestic actors against Prime Minister Albin Kurti. And there is no verified public record showing that she has endorsed or facilitated any project aimed at the territorial partition of Kosovo.

But there is also no clear public rebuttal from the presidency to a growing set of questions touching on sovereign secrecy, constitutional judgement, political alliances and personal ambition. On several matters of evident public importance, the silence has been striking.

The result is a presidency now shadowed by doubt, not because all accusations against it are proven, but because too many serious questions have been allowed to accumulate without transparent institutional answer.

For a politician whose rise was built on the language of legality, democratic integrity and state dignity, that may be the gravest development of all.

A presidency once defined by rupture

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The paper trail does not end at the runway. A hotel voucher, dated the same day, confirms a reservation at the Belgrade City Hotel in Savski Venac. Check-in: 21 January 2026. Check-out: 7 February 2026. Seventeen nights. Total cost: €1,113. “No prepayment is needed,” the voucher notes.

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What I discovered in those capitals was a shared, weary recognition of a man who has played all sides of a tragedy.

The is not merely a revisit of old wounds; it is the result of a year spent chasing the whispers that follow Haxhiu across borders. From the quiet admissions of retired diplomats to the searing resentment of those who truly bled for Kosovo’s freedom, the picture has finally clarified. The evidence didn’t change, but my understanding of the mission behind it did. Now, the stories from behind his curtains can no longer remain in the shadows.

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For readers in Washington, it was a story about factional warfare inside Trump world. For readers in the Balkans, where Grenell has played a consequential role, it was something more. It was a signal.

According to the Daily Mail, Grenell, who once rose through the ranks of Trump’s movement and briefly led the United States intelligence community in 2020, now finds himself running the Kennedy Center as it prepares for a two year closure and major reconstruction. The paper reports that President Trump announced plans to shutter the institution for a massive overhaul, leaving Grenell presiding over what one source described as a venue in turm…

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What follows is an account of a methodology rather than a verdict. It is built from matching information from at least four sources, two of them international, as well as publicly available evidence in Kosovo that we have verified through documents, broadcast material and institutional records. A fifth source is an on the record interview we conducted with Gazmend Halilaj, who describes himself as a former KLA member, later Kosovo Protection Corps and Kosovo Police investigator, and who says he became an assassination target after speaking publicly about alleged wartime fund theft and intimidation linked to Sami Lushtaku. We treat his testimony as testimony, not as proof of every allegation it contains. We also treat the public record as a spine, and what sources describe as muscle, the part that moves when nobody is supposed to be watching.

The record begins before the peace. In the late nineteen nineties Kosovo was not only fighting Serbia, it was also deciding who would inherit the state that did not yet exist. That is not a romantic way to put it. It is simply the political reality of insurgencies. Command becomes currency. Loyalty becomes a career. Rivalry becomes a security problem. In that environment the line between political strategy and personal survival is thin enough to step over without noticing.

After June 1999 the world changed faster than institutions could. The international presence arrived, first as a promise, later as a bureaucracy. UNMIK took on a state building role in a society where weapons were plentiful and authority was fragmented. EULEX would follow, tasked with rule of law in a country where rule of force had not fully receded. In that gap, according to sources, a particular kind of violence emerged. It was not random. It was selective. It did not aim to terrorise a whole population. It aimed to reorganise elites.

One killing is often described as the first post war political murder in Kosovo. It was the murder of Haki Imeri on 2 November 1999. In the account provided to us by a source who says they were inside Thaçi’s inner circle and who now lives between Kosovo and Switzerland, Imeri was not only a local Lidhja Demokratike e Kosovës organiser and respected teacher. He was also socially embedded in the Drenica landscape that produced many of the war’s commanders and much of its post war political leadership. He had taught Thaçi. He had known the families. He was a figure whose continued independence could not be easily managed.

The source describes a sequence that matters more than the brutality. First came the approach framed as a conversation. A meeting. An invitation that felt legitimate because the war had normalised command structures and made certain men the arbiters of movement. Then came a staged authority. Men presenting themselves as KLA military police. The phrase is crucial. It signals that the operation, if the account is accurate, relied on the symbolic residue of wartime institutions to create compliance. You do not need a badge if the fear already recognises you.

From there, according to the source, the operation shifted into a second phase that appears repeatedly in later accounts. Narrative placement. The body, they claim, was moved in a way intended to attach guilt elsewhere. Blame as a weapon. Not merely to protect perpetrators, but to damage a rival. The rival named in these accounts is Rexhep Selimi2.

This was not, in the telling, a single deception. It was a long term one. The claim is that for years Selimi was positioned as the shadow behind multiple post war crimes, including the murder of Xhemajl Mustafa3, the assassination attempt on Fetah Rudi4, and the killing of Ekrem Rexha5. The mechanism described is consistent. Feed decontextualised intelligence into international investigators. Let the system do what it does. Create a paper trail that looks official enough to repeat. According to these sources, SHIK6, described as an intelligence structure linked to Thaçi’s circle, was central both to operations and to disinformation.

This is where our international sources enter. The first is the institutional record around Mustafa’s murder. On 23 November 2000 Mustafa was killed in front of his apartment in Prishtina. UNMIK issued a statement7 expressing outrage at the killing and identifying him as a senior LDK adviser. A later account from Prishtina Insight8 notes that no suspect has been charged and that the case remains one of Kosovo’s most consequential unresolved political murders. This is not a minor detail. A vacuum in accountability becomes usable. When no one is convicted, everyone can be implicated. When everyone can be implicated, whoever controls the flow of insinuation controls the boundaries of fear.

The second international strand is the record of wartime crimes and post war power. In May 2015 an EULEX panel at the Basic Court in Mitrovica convicted Sami Lushtaku of murder and sentenced him to twelve years’ imprisonment in the Drenica cases9. This judgment is not proof of later political killings. But it establishes a relevant fact about the type of actor he was, the kind of environment he operated within, and the seriousness with which international and local judicial structures, at least in that instance, treated allegations of violence. It also offers a bridge between two worlds. The wartime commander and the post war political enforcer are not separate roles. They are consecutive ones.

That bridge becomes central to the methodology described by sources. Their claim is not that Thaçi personally carried out killings. It is that he shaped a system where killings, threats and reputational destruction were instruments of political consolidation, and where specific men, including Lushtaku, functioned as implementers.

This is where chronology matters.

First, eliminate or neutralise opponents in the volatile early post war period, when international missions are still learning the terrain and local policing is weak.
Second, consolidate party structures.
Third, formalise informal networks inside security and intelligence.
Fourth, when scrutiny intensifies, shift from violence alone to a mixture of violence, legal manipulation and disinformation.

The sources provide a blunt summary, and it is worth quoting because it captures the claimed logic in plain language. Hashim gives the order, SHIK executes, and the disinformation department attributes crimes to others so the clan dominates and profits politically and materially. It is a neat sentence. It is also, if true, a description of state capture in miniature. But we cannot treat it as true simply because it is neat. We can only trace where it intersects with verifiable events.

One intersection is the claim that Thaçi privately acknowledged responsibility for Mustafa’s killing to Fatmir Limaj10 on the day of the murder, allegedly saying, “This is our work.”

We cannot independently verify that conversation. No recording is publicly available, and none was provided to us. We therefore present it as an allegation from a source who claims proximity to SHIK at the time. The value of the allegation is not its dramatic quality. Its value is that it fits the broader described method. The method requires a small circle to know enough to coordinate, while the public knows only enough to fear.

The disinformation element becomes clearer in a second set of claims that we have now received from another source. They say that after Mustafa’s murder, information was channelled to international missions11 suggesting that Selimi was behind Mustafa’s killing, Rudi’s assassination attempt and Rexha’s killing. The objective, they claim, was to weaponise international institutions as unwitting amplifiers. This would be a sophisticated tactic because it uses the credibility of outsiders to launder internal factional warfare. It also matches a broader pattern observed in other contexts. When a system is partially internationalised, influence operations often target the interface. The translator. The liaison. The report.

We have not seen the alleged intelligence submissions themselves. We have, however, seen public reporting that indicates investigations were plagued by conflicting leads and by claims of knowledge within international missions. For example, an account12 attributed to the Journalists Association of Serbia claims that EULEX investigators believed they knew who was responsible for Mustafa’s murder and names a suspect. We do not treat that as definitive. But it supports the broader point that the case has long been surrounded by assertions of hidden knowledge and institutional paralysis, an environment in which disinformation thrives.

Another intersection is the way internal rivals are described. The second source claims that Thaçi’s motive for seeking Selimi’s imprisonment and elimination was that Selimi had knowledge from wartime about the killing of another figure, allegedly linked to Thaçi. Whether that specific wartime claim is provable is beyond what we can establish here. What we can establish is the plausibility of the incentive structure. In systems of clandestine violence, knowledge is liability. A man who knows too much and cannot be reliably controlled becomes a threat, even if he is loyal in other respects. The removal of such a man can be framed as justice or necessity. The framing is the point.

This brings us to another tool alleged to have been used for two decades. Komunikata 59. In Kosovo, communiques issued in the name of the KLA during the war carried enormous symbolic authority. In the post war period, invoking them could function as a retroactive verdict. A person labelled a traitor in a wartime communique could be socially condemned, economically isolated and physically endangered, even if no court ever found wrongdoing. In that sense, Komunikata 59, if used as described, would be less a document than a weapon.

The claim from the source is that Thaçi circulated Komunikata 59 against Gani Geci13 while presenting it in his media circles as the work of Selimi. The claim continues. Selimi publicly stated14 that Thaçi drafted and issued the communique, and that Selimi asked him not to publish it because it contained falsehoods about Geci.

The alleged consequence is serious. The source says that after the communique circulated, several people were killed and Geci was wounded. We cannot verify the causal chain as stated. But we can identify the method being alleged.

Step one, publish a delegitimising narrative in the language of wartime loyalty.
Step two, allow that narrative to produce social licence for violence.
Step three, when consequences follow, attribute authorship to a rival.

In this scheme the communique is not simply propaganda. It is an ignition.

Around this point in chronology the party apparatus consolidates. Thaçi moves through roles, from war leadership to political leadership, establishing Partia Demokratike e Kosovës — PDK15 dominance and holding top state offices. In parallel, sources allege the embedding of intelligence structures that are informal yet effective, described as SHIK, linked to party power, staffed by wartime loyalists, and tasked not only with surveillance but with enforcement. Such claims have long circulated in Kosovo and have been the subject of reporting and political argument. We will not rest them as fact. But we note that the persistence of the SHIK narrative itself speaks to an institutional deficit. When a society believes a shadow structure exists, that belief shapes behaviour whether or not the structure is as powerful as claimed.

Then, as institutions begin to stiffen, the method described shifts from pure violence toward a blended approach. This is where the fifth source, our interview with Halilaj, becomes especially relevant because it illustrates the alleged mechanics of intimidation and attempted neutralisation in a later period, when courts, police and media are all part of the ecosystem.

We interviewed Gazmend Halilaj on the record in Drenas in late December 2025, with his explicit permission to record and publish. In his account, the early post war period was defined by impunity. He says he survived two assassination attempts. Halilaj describes a climate in which dissenters were first denigrated and labelled pro Serb, and, when that failed, targeted with violence. Separately, an assassination attempt against Halilaj on 14 April 2020 is documented16 in Kosovo media reporting and later court coverage.

We do not repeat the most graphic details of his account. But we can summarise the structure of what he claims happened to him in April 2020, because the structure is the heart of this piece. He says he publicly spoke about alleged theft of wartime funds linked to Lushtaku, and that soon afterwards he noticed surveillance and changes in police patrolling patterns near his home. He claims that on 14 April 2020 he was attacked by armed men, escaped, and that a key struggle afterwards involved not only identifying the attackers but preventing an institutional narrative from being constructed that blamed him. In his words, the goal was to present the incident as self inflicted, to make him a criminal rather than a victim, and to destroy his credibility.

This is the modern version of a very old tactic. If you cannot silence a person quietly, you can discredit them publicly. If you can discredit them publicly, you can isolate them socially. If you can isolate them socially, you can make violence against them easier, or make their disappearance less costly. Halilaj claims that video evidence existed and that there were attempts to erase or manipulate it. He says that only the intervention of external actors, including embassies, forced arrests that did not match what he believes is the truth of who attacked him. He further claims that legal outcomes were wildly disproportionate, including a fine for intimidation where, in his view, the conduct amounted to attempted murder. We cannot adjudicate these claims. What we can do is note how precisely they fit the method described by the two sources about Thaçi. A cycle of delegating violence, then using institutions, media and paperwork to rewrite authorship and blame.

Halilaj’s account also contains another element that aligns with the earlier claims. Debt creation. He describes a system where people are pulled into wrongdoing through incentives and then controlled through kompromat17. The person who does the dirty work becomes dependent. The dependency can then be exploited for further acts, until the dependent becomes a risk, at which point they too can be discarded. This logic mirrors the comment we received during our northern Kosovo reporting in late 2025, from an interlocutor who put it this way.

According to a source described as part of Hashim Thaçi’s inner circle, the former Kosovo leader allegedly employed a method of indirect coercion in which perceived opponents were framed as threats to third parties, who were then encouraged to “neutralise” them in exchange for protection.

“If Thaçi wanted you dead, he would find someone else and convince them that you were a danger to them,” the source claims. “He would then promise protection if they removed you. Once that happens, the person becomes indebted and can be pressured into further removals, until they themselves become a liability and are replaced. It’s a conveyor belt of coercion.”

The same source claims that Sami Lushtaku has not maintained good relations with Hashim Thaçi for more than a year, allegedly due to fears that Thaçi currently detained in The Hague, may speak openly about past events and implicate former associates.

According to the source, Lushtaku allegedly fears that Thaçi could reveal details of his involvement if cooperation with prosecutors were to occur. The source further claims that Lushtaku remains among the most dangerous political figures in Kosovo due to his alleged access to armed networks and continued political protection linked to Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK).

The source alleges that Lushtaku was previously used in operations employing the same methodology described above and claims he is prepared to use lethal force against anyone perceived as a threat, though these allegations have not been independently verified.

The source has agreed to provide documentation intended to substantiate the reasons and circumstances under which he claims to have had access to this information. He states that he is not from northern Kosovo, but deliberately chose the region as a temporary safe zone from which to speak. We have verified that the source is an ethnic Albanian and a citizen of Kosovo, but are withholding further identifying details due to credible concerns for his safety.

In that scheme, Lushtaku’s alleged role becomes clearer. He is not merely a violent man, in the popular caricature. He is an organiser of coercive capacity. His public record includes a major wartime conviction in a case heard under EULEX judicial authority18. And his international status includes listing by the United States Treasury on the Balkans sanctions programme19, with his identifying details on the OFAC sanctions search database. Sanctions are not convictions. But they are formal determinations by a foreign government that an individual is implicated in conduct that threatens stability or governance. In Kosovo’s post war context, a sanctioned political actor can still retain local influence, which tells you something about the resilience of informal power.

So how, exactly, does the alleged methodology work, when put in chronological order.

First, identify targets based on power not ideology. In the early post war period, sources say the targets were often LDK figures and internal rivals within the former KLA sphere, people whose presence complicated the consolidation of a single post war centre of authority. Haki Imeri fits this pattern in their telling. So do other names that circulate in Kosovo’s memory of that era.

Second, approach under the cover of legitimacy. The invitation to talk. The meeting framed as a political or security necessity. The use of wartime labels such as military police. The goal is to ensure the target moves voluntarily into vulnerability.

Third, execute through intermediaries. The sources do not depict Thaçi as a gunman. They depict him as a director who keeps plausible deniability by using trusted operators and by distributing knowledge so that no one person can fully reconstruct the chain.

Fourth, stage blame. This is where placement becomes crucial. If a murder can be made to point toward a rival, the murder becomes a dual weapon. It removes the victim and wounds the rival. The claim that Imeri’s body was moved to implicate Selimi is a quintessential example. The claim that international missions were fed intelligence pointing at Selimi in other cases is the institutional version of the same act.

Fifth, reinforce the blame through repetition and artefacts. Komunikata 59, in this reading, is a durable artefact used to fix an enemy identity onto a person, so that future violence appears to arise organically from public hatred rather than from orchestration. This is why the communique matters even decades later. It is not only about who wrote it. It is about what it allowed.

Sixth, neutralise investigators and witnesses not only by threatening them but by corrupting the processes around them. Halilaj’s account centres on this. He describes pressure on police, manipulation of evidence, and a media ecosystem used to shame and isolate. In his words, the most powerful weapon is not the gun. It is humiliation backed by the state’s voice.

Seventh, when scrutiny increases, shift tactics. The creation of the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague changed the atmosphere. People began calculating risk differently. In the earlier account we received, Thaçi is described as visiting a victim’s family after many years, offering partial information and redirecting blame, a form of pre emptive damage control. In other words, when a court appears capable of imposing consequences, the system adapts. It does not dissolve.

This is the point where our April 2025 national security line of inquiry connects back to the post war killings methodology. If a network exists, as our reporting has investigated and revealed involvement of figures such as Richard Grenell, Edi Rama, Halit Sahitaj, Milaim Zeka, Berat Buzhala, Artan Behrami and others that aims to undermine the court process in The Hague, it would not be a new idea. It would be an extension of an older practice, the use of information operations to shape justice outcomes. The actors change uniforms. The logic remains familiar.

None of this establishes criminal guilt. It establishes a model alleged by multiple sources, and it shows how that model coheres with certain verified realities. Kosovo has unresolved political murders. Kosovo has a documented history of wartime crimes adjudicated with international participation. Kosovo has a political ecosystem where a sanctioned individual can still operate as a public actor. Kosovo has a long record of public disputes over authorship of wartime communiques and responsibility for post war violence.

The most important part, though, is not any single fact. It is the consistency of the described mechanisms across time and across sources.

In the nineteen nineties, Halilaj says, the method was straightforward. Speak against the powerful and you are labelled a traitor. If the label sticks, you are socially dead. If you persist, you may become physically dead. In the two thousands, according to sources, the method becomes more complex. Killings still happen, but so do narrative operations. Bodies are placed. rivalries are scripted. International missions are fed leads that redirect suspicion. In the twenty tens and twenty twenties, the system, if the accounts are accurate, becomes even more integrated. Media partners, corrupted officials and institutional capture are used to achieve outcomes that once required a gunman in the dark.

Halilaj himself offers a line that captures this evolution. He says that after denigration comes physical elimination, and after physical elimination comes reputational killing, the destruction of the name. That is the logic of a system that expects to survive. If the victim dies and the story dies with them, fine. If the victim survives, the story must still be broken.

There is a temptation, when confronted with accounts like these, to reach for a grand analogy. People in the Balkans do this often. They invoke Stalin. They invoke the Kremlin. They invoke hybrid warfare. Sometimes they do it because it is true. Sometimes they do it because it is emotionally satisfying, a way of turning local pain into a global narrative. The safer approach is narrower. Focus on method, not metaphor.

The method described here is a politics of delegated violence and delegated blame. It depends on intermediaries. It depends on the creation of debts. It depends on the laundering of accusations through institutions that appear neutral. It depends on media that can amplify smear and suppress context. And it depends on the international community’s chronic weakness in post conflict environments, the preference for stability over confrontation until it is too late.

You can see this preference in the historical posture toward powerful local actors. International missions often delay action when they fear unrest. They gather evidence slowly. They hope the men with guns will become men with suits. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they become men with suits who still command guns.

In the story of Mustafa’s murder, this tension is visible in the simplest fact of all. Two and a half decades on, the family still waits for a charge. When justice does not arrive, power learns that it can take time. When power can take time, it can also take witnesses.

If the accounts from our sources are accurate, then the central feature of Thaçi’s alleged methodology is not a particular killing. It is the conversion of violence into political architecture. Each death, each smear, each misdirected investigation becomes a brick. The structure built from those bricks is a system in which rivals are removed, loyalists are bound, and the public is taught to confuse fear with patriotism.

There is a final detail that returns us to the present. Halilaj says he supported the Kosovo Specialist Chambers openly and called it a national asset. He describes threats for doing so. Whatever one thinks of the court, his position highlights something Kosovo has struggled to articulate. A society that cannot investigate its own liberation movement is not protecting its liberation. It is protecting the people who exploited it.

The question our reporting keeps returning to is not whether every allegation is true. The question is what it means that so many independent accounts, from different angles, describe the same machinery. The names change in each telling. The gears do not.

In that sense, the most hard hitting detail is also the most banal. A murder. A file. A rumour. A communique. A televised accusation. A police report that goes nowhere. A court process delayed. A witness intimidated. None of these alone prove a system. Together, they describe the environment in which a system can exist and in which, according to our sources, it did.

We will continue to verify what can be verified. We will continue to separate what is documented from what is alleged. But we will not pretend that allegation is meaningless in a country where silence has so often been the condition of survival.

The documents came first.

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The allegations are serious and unprecedented, not because they emerged from official proceedings, but because of where they appeared and what followed. After Patrick Byrne’s public br…

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Those early years shaped how I look at power. I learned to read between the lines of official statements, to listen as much to what was not said as to what was being said, and to treat every reassurance with a private question. Later, as I moved into journalism and then relocated to London, those instincts stayed. London opened doors that Prishtina never could. Private members clubs frequented by former diplomats, retired intelligence officials, and the sort of people whose real work is never advertised. In t…

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Twenty four hours later the silence broke, not from the man at the centre of the story but from his wife and collaborator, Edlira Qefalija. Her Facebook statement2 tried to turn a serious investigation into a circus of insults, sexual insinuations and accusations about supposed motives. If you strip away the shouting, what remains is a collection of claims that do not survive contact with the record.

Start with perhaps the simplest one. She writes that the editor of this newsroom , has been writing about her husband for two or three years and paints this as a kind of unhealthy fixation. That is factually false. The Gunpowder Chronicles did not have Mr Zeka on its radar for years. He entered the picture this February when his associate, Halit Sahitaj, approached the newsroom with fabricated material that tried to link Richard Grenell to Russian money through cryptocurrency. That attempt to draw an independent newsroom into an operation of disinformation was documented as it happened3.

Only after that did Mr Sahitaj, in his own conversations with the newsroom, drop the name of Milaim Zeka and refer to the complaint drafted by John F Moynihan4. When reporters began going through that document they discovered two things.

• First, that it was built heavily on testimonies and claims from Mr Zeka5, Ms Qefalija, Mr Sahitaj6 and Mr Darko Perovic7.

• Second, that Mr Moynihan himself wrote on around page thirteen that he could not fully trust those same testimonies and that the information they provided did not meet his own standards of credibility.

That is the moment when a newsroom with any sense of responsibility begins to investigate. Not because of obsession, but because a group of people were actively using a report to attack a court while the author of that report was, in the very same text, questioning their honesty.

From there the picture widened. Reporting over the past year has shown that Mr Perovic is described by security linked sources as a Montenegrin born operator with roots in Serbian security structures. Evidence and witness accounts have linked Mr Sahitaj to Russian state interests in Europe, including cases involving threats to anti Putin activists. Together with Mr and Ms Zeka, they appear in documents, communications and operations that seek to damage the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, to shape public narratives in favour of particular former wartime elites and to manufacture kompromat on targeted high value individuals. It is this operation that the Gunpowder Chronicles has been exposing. With other outlets they have sometimes succeeded, but their attempts to fabricate kompromat against us failed.

Against this background, Ms Qefalija tries to place herself and her husband in the role of innocent victims of some personal vendetta. She calls the investigation the product of a sick mind and tries to reduce a year of work with multiple sources and documents to the fantasy of a lonely man who cannot stop thinking about her husband. This is not argument. It is evasion.

Her handling of the most sensitive question is similar. The investigation reported that multiple independent international sources, whose credibility has been carefully tested, believe that Mr Zeka has been violently assaulted twice in the past two years and that one of those assaults included sexual abuse. The article did not present these as established facts. It made clear that these were serious allegations grounded in sources and placed them within a long documented pattern of pressure and risk in the network around him. It also reported something visible to anyone who cares to look. In a recent television appearance8, Mr Zeka appeared with a darkened area on his right upper cheek and below his eye, concealed beneath heavy make up.

The newsroom showed stills from that appearance to surgeons for professional opinion. They could not, of course, diagnose without examining the patient. They could say that the mark resembled blunt force bruising rather than a standard early stage post surgical scar and that the level and style of make up used on air would be unusual shortly after sutures to that area. On that basis the newsroom described the bruise as circumstantial, not conclusive. It did not claim that the mark proved the assaults. It treated it as one more element that demanded questions.

Ms Qefalija now offers a different story. She claims that on twenty four October her husband underwent facial surgery to remove a large suspected cancerous mass and names a maxillofacial surgeon, Ngadhnjim Domi of Ars Medica9. According to her, the mark on his face is purely postoperative. She also says that the medical documentation has been submitted to a court in Pristina.

If true, those are serious statements. They deserve scrutiny, not applause.

If this was a significant facial operation, why did she and her husband keep silent when the newsroom wrote twice before publication asking specifically about recent violence and inviting any explanation for visible marks.

Why did they not say a word about a serious medical procedure at that stage.
Why did that disclosure arrive only after the investigation appeared.

If the mark is a normal post surgical result, why did surgeons consulted by the newsroom find the appearance more consistent with a bruise than with healing tissue. Why was the area apparently masked so heavily for television so soon after surgery. Would a responsible surgeon endorse that decision?

Perhaps most puzzling of all, why would the documentation for such a procedure be filed with a court. In what legal process. At whose request. For what purpose. If the operation has nothing to do with any ongoing litigation, sending files to court would be meaningless. If it does have something to do with a case, which one. Who is invoking it. Is this about a genuine medical need or is it being turned into an instrument in some parallel battle.

There is an obvious way to clear this up. The Frontline Media Group has already invited Ms Qefalija to provide the original uncompressed photographs she posted, together with full medical reports and written permission to pose limited factual questions to the named surgeon or clinic. That would allow forensic and medical experts to assess whether her account stands up. So far, she has chosen Facebook rather than transparency.

This pattern continues when she tries to discredit the reporting on the sale of wartime footage. By his own public admission, in a Facebook post10 in two thousand and twenty four, her husband sold extensive material he shot with the Kosovo Liberation Army during the war to Serbian documentary maker Sladana Zaric, whose films for Serbian state television and the Ministry of Interior have pushed narratives portraying the KLA as terrorists and reviving long discredited claims of organ trafficking. The payment of one thousand nine hundred and fifty euro, again by his own account, was transferred into the bank account of Ms Qefalija in Tirana.

These are not rumours. They are Mr Zeka’s words. The questions that follow are natural ones.

How does Ms Qefalija feel about the fact that her husband handed wartime images of Koshare fighters and other KLA units to a producer funded by Serbian state structures who then built work that accuses KLA of the most grotesque crimes. How does she feel about the fact that the money from that deal, a deal that strengthened Belgrade’s ability to criminalise former KLA members on screen, did not even stop in his account but went straight into hers.

Does she accept that many former KLA fighters now face arrest warrants and prosecutions by Serbian authorities in part on the basis of visual material and narratives that Serbian institutions have built over years. Does she understand that the footage her husband sold sits inside that ecosystem. Does she have anything to say to the families of those who now move carefully across borders because Serbian prosecutors hold dossiers that mix genuine evidence with images and claims supplied by people like her husband?

The one payment he disclosed is modest by the standards of state propaganda budgets. Was that the only sum? Can she provide full bank statements showing that there were no other transfers from Serbian institutions, intermediaries or their production companies linked to that material? Can she say, clearly and on record, whether any further funds in cash have been received for those images or for related cooperation with Serbian media, or whether any other accounts have been used?

Our newsroom has additional allegations in its files about further payments and is still working to verify them to a standard that meets its duty of care to readers. Until that process is complete they will not be published as fact. But Ms Qefalija knows they exist. She also knows that silence and insult are not an answer.

Throughout her statement she leans heavily on language that tries to pathologise the journalist rather than confront the evidence. She calls the investigation a product of a sick mind. She mocks the mention of possible sexual abuse and tries to turn it into an accusation of hidden fantasies. She speaks as though the only reason to ask questions about violence and humiliation is a personal fascination rather than the basic logic that someone who has moved for years in a dangerous grey zone between justice, politics and covert networks may one day become expendable to those who once saw him as useful.

She also attempts to claim the mantle of journalism for herself and her husband while dismissing an entire newsroom as second rate conspiracy peddlers. Yet she does not point to a single piece of independent, evidence based reporting she has produced. She does not engage with the documentation and interviews that underpin the Gunpowder Chronicles series on her husband as well as their associates such as Mr Sahitaj, Mr Perovic and others. She does not even acknowledge that when her husband wanted to talk about his crusade against Jack Smith and the court, he was willing to call journalists and push them to print his claims. It is only once the focus turns to his own conduct that the press suddenly becomes a mob.

There is nothing wrong with anger when someone believes their loved one has been wronged. What matters is what that anger is built on. Insults do not alter the following facts.

The newsroom approached Mr Zeka twice before publication. He chose not to respond.

The allegations about attacks on him come from multiple independent sources with direct knowledge of the environment around the Kosovo Specialist Chambers. Their credibility has been tested over time. They are not anonymous voices plucked from comment threads.

The Moynihan complaint, so often waved around by this network as a weapon, contains the author’s own warning that he does not fully trust the testimonies of the same people who now call themselves victims of a smear.

The sale of wartime footage to a Serbian state backed producer is a matter of public record, as is the declaration that the money for it went into Ms Qefalija’s account.

The offer remains on the table. If Ms Qefalija and her husband can provide verifiable evidence that any element of the reporting is wrong, the Gunpowder Chronicles will examine it forensically and will correct or retract anything that does not withstand that examination. That is what serious journalism does. What it will not do is accept that a Facebook post dripping with contempt should carry more weight than corroborated sources and documents.

Until they choose evidence over insult, readers are entitled to draw their own conclusions. Not about imagined love stories or invented obsessions, but about who is actually answering questions and who is doing everything possible to avoid them.

The Frontline Media Group

Setting the Record Straight: Our Response to Ms Qefalija’s Claims

The Frontline Media Group, publisher of The Gunpowder Chronicles and Kronikat e Barutit, issues the following response to the Facebook statement made today by Ms Edlira Qefalija, wife and collaborator of Mr Milaim Zeka, concerning our investigation “Kush po e torturon Milaim Zekën? Fijet çojnë te njerëzit e Hashim Thaçit…

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5 months ago · Vudi Xhymshiti

When Kosovo television viewers watched Milaim Zeka appear on Kanal 10 this autumn1, some noticed what they believed was more than studio cosmetics. A faint swelling on the right side of his nose and upper cheek, apparently covered with make-up, set off quiet questions in Pristina. Those questions turned into something more serious when international sources told The Gunpowder Chronicles that they believe Zeka has twice been violently attacked, beaten and sexually abused by men they describe as loyal to former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi, now on trial at The Hague.

According to these sources, the first attack took place around late summer of 2023. They allege that during that incident Zeka was not only beaten but also sexually violated. A second assault is believed to have occurred in recent weeks. The sources link both events directly to Zeka’s past role as a witness and …

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On 30 September, Zeka’s portal “Pa Rrotlla” began publishing what it presented as audio “transcripts2” implicating Nenad Rasic by then poised to become the ethnic-Serb deputy speaker3 in talk of kickbacks, invoices and favours.

“Pa Rrotlla brings exclusively… a conversation that raises serious doubts about corruption within the Government of Kosovo,”

- the site announced, introducing a running series framed as ministerial graft and stitched together with suggestive narration and partial, frequently inaudible lines.

The portal asserted, incorrectly, that Rasic was a serving minister in the Kurti government, in fact, the following week parliament would elect him deputy speaker from the Serb community, a choice that broke4 an eight-month deadlock5 and enraged Belgrade’s proxies.

The material landed precisely as Kosovo’s leadership positions were being decided. With the Serbian List boycotting and threatening appeals, Rasic who opposes Belgrade’s iron hold over Serb politics in Kosovo, was advanced by a cross-party majority. International wires noted the significance6, Belgrade-aligned outlets fumed, constitutional lawyers argued7. The timing of the “leaks” was exquisite.

Then the floor dropped. On 9 October, police arrested Sheholli8 on suspicion of espionage in an operation led by the Special Prosecution, with raids at his home and vehicle. Officials said he was detained for 48 hours pending a detention request9, the interior minister hailed10 the case as a priority for national security. The following day, courts approved pre-trial custody11.

By evening, broadcasters were carrying exclusive footage of the arrest and Zeka was already everywhere, on Facebook12, in studio chairs insisting he had simply met a source for coffee when officers swept in. He told T7’s13 “Frontal” that he was questioned as a witness and volunteered that the “Pa Rrotlla” materials had come to him via a USB drive he attributed to Sheholli.

In his own words: “Fatmir Sheholli… is arrested for some recordings or a USB which he gave to me and that we published on Pa Rrotlla.”

On air he added that he had arranged to deliver the USB and documents to the Special Prosecution after the 12 October local elections. The performance was classic Zeka aggrieved, performative, and assiduously constructed to cast himself as a journalist targeted for telling hard truths14.

But by then, the Prosecution’s file circulated to multiple newsrooms had laid out a very different story. According to those documents, Sheholli was not a whistle-blower at all, prosecutors allege he was working under the instruction of a named official of Serbia’s Security and Information Agency (BIA)15, Bojan Dimic. The file asserts that, on 26 September, following a plan prepared by Dimic16, Sheholli travelled to North Mitrovica and collected a package in the car park of the technical school, audio materials and written transcripts said to be “compromising” conversations involving officials of the Ministry for Communities and Returns. He is further alleged to have received a cash payment as a reward for their publication »in online media« which is exactly what followed on “Pa Rrotlla” four days later.

If correct, the Prosecutor’s account maps neatly onto what unfolded in public view. It also mirrors a pattern Kosovars know well, disinformation packaged for virality, cut to the rhythms of domestic politics, then laundered through talk-shows and portals with just enough gloss to pass for journalism. The haul was not only the narratives themselves, but the reactive chaos they triggered, press cycles consumed by scandal; minority deputies put on the defensive; a constitutional process further polarised.

Zeka’s conduct and his own words tie him to the operation’s media logistics. On Klan Kosova17 and T7 he said he had the files, that he and his team translated and scripted the stories, that he teased further “parts” for broadcast that the Special Prosecution had “moved” to obtain his materials. He presented these as standard reporting. The file suggests they were the downstream product of a hostile service. None of this proves Zeka was knowingly acting to a foreign brief, it does demonstrate that his portal functioned as the delivery system for an information operation alleged to have been directed by BIA.

Rasic himself, facing a barrage in the final days before the Assembly completed its leadership slate, responded in carefully chosen terms. At a press conference in Gracanica on 10 October18, he said that in late July several close associates had been phoned from Serbian numbers by callers who claimed affiliation with Belgrade’s intelligence structures, demanding meetings and warning that “compromising” materials would be published if they refused. He said he had notified authorities when he learned in mid-August that some newsrooms had received recordings, and rejected the “Pa Rrotlla” tapes as fabricated. The next day, as the presidency mandated Albin Kurti to form a government after the leadership vote19, the broader political context snapped into focus, Kosovo’s top officials were openly accusing Serbia20 of direct interference in the run-up to the 12 October local elections, including vote-buying and intimidation in Serb-majority areas21.

In this light, it is worth examining “Pa Rrotlla’s” editorial method. The site presented textual “transcripts” with gaps, partial lines, and authorial scaffolding that told readers what to conclude. It offered no complete audio, no verifiable dates, no chain of custody. The people accused were not afforded meaningful right of reply. It was editorially, an exercise in direction, not documentation. Even the basic premise was bent to fit the attack line labelling Rasic “a minister of Kurti’s Government” suggested the content targeted the administration, when in fact the political object, on the eve of crucial votes, was a Serb politician who refuses Belgrade’s whip.

Nor is this Zeka’s first dance in the shadows where media, politics and intel structures meet. In April, separate reporting traced his public alliance with Halit Sahitaj22, a figure linked by European sources to Russian-aligned networks, and documented his self-promotion as a conduit of “proof” against the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, claims that wilted when pressed for evidence23. Zeka’s own social posts from late 202424 boasted of convincing Sahitaj and a Montenegrin associate Darko Perovic25 to advance a counter-narrative about The Hague’s prosecutors. Whether one sees a grifter’s improvisation or a political asset’s tasking, the pattern is the same, grandiose claims, selective “leaks,” and a studied intimacy with those who trade in kompromat. (Zeka did not substantively respond to detailed questions from investigators, when he does respond publicly, he tends to accuse his critics of conspiracy and jealousy26.)

This latest episode, however, is less about his bombast than about effects. The Prosecution’s file is explicit the aim, it says, was to collect information on Kosovo’s institutions and agitate the information space by “publishing in online media” materials tailored to discredit officials at the Ministry for Communities and Returns. If you were mapping a playbook to disrupt the election of an independent Serb deputy speaker and discredit those around him, you would choose exactly this arc pre-position stories, time their release to parliamentary votes, flood talk-shows, muddy the record just as foreign and domestic observers are scanning for procedural legitimacy27.

The political weather, too, mattered. In the days before the arrest, Kosovo’s president accused Serbia of directly interfering in the municipal elections, Kurti told a cabinet meeting that Belgrade’s methods patronage promises, pressure, cash were a “repeated pattern,” and urged the EU to impose costs. When parliament finally broke the impasse and elected Rasic as deputy speaker, Associated Press and other outlets emphasised how the choice defied the Serbian List, Belgrade’s instrument in Kosovo. Against that backdrop, a series of salacious “audios” purporting to show the Serb deputy speaker’s circle on the take were more than clickbait. They were political ordnance.

Zeka’s own defence that he was targeted for journalism, wilts under the open record he created. He told T7 he received the files, arranged translations, plotted publication and teaser schedules, and was readying further drops. He also volunteered that he had contacted the chief of the Special Prosecution to hand over the USB after election day “so as not to interfere” with the campaign. That timeline is revealing, if he truly thought the materials evidenced crime, the duty was to submit them, not to run a serialised political narrative and wait for the polls to close. That is not reporting, it is programming.

There remains the question Kosovars always ask when the curtain falls, who, exactly, is accountable for the media vector of such an operation? The Prosecution’s file squarely names Sheholli and alleges direction by BIA’s Bojan Dimic. It says the money flowed for publication and that online outlets obliged. It does not, at least in the excerpts reported, announce charges against those outlets or their editors. It may yet do so, it may also be that prosecutors, prioritising the counter-intelligence spine of the case, chose to move first on the alleged handler-asset channel. But the logic of the file points downstream, if publication was purchased to launder hostile influence, the laundromat matters.

Some will protest press freedom here, and they are right to guard it jealously. But freedom is strengthened, not weakened, when those who masquerade as journalists to run black-box operations are made to answer questions any editor should welcome:

• Who supplied you?

• What did you do to verify?

• When did you alert authorities to the existence of covert recordings?

• Why did you time your serialisation to parliamentary votes?

• Who paid you, and how?

Those questions are not censorship, they are the minimum due diligence in a polity waging a daily information war.

There is a final, sharper edge to this story. Zeka was detained but not arrested28. He gave his witness statement, went back on television, and resumed portraying himself as the protagonist of a political drama scripted by his enemies. If the Prosecution’s narrative holds and if money did change hands to seed hostile content into Kosovo’s media stream, why is the man who operationalised the narrative still filming himself at hotel cafés? Perhaps investigators are moving up the chain first. Perhaps they judge that the clearest criminal exposure sits with the alleged agent and his handlers. Perhaps, too, there are other calculations in play, the enduring Balkan economy of secrets, favours and files in drawers. In a country where dossiers often outlive governments, the question answers itself with a question, on whom does he have kompromat?

Kosovo cannot afford to shrug this off as another autumn scandal. The Assembly only just succeeded in constituting itself, the presidency has mandated Kurti to try to form a cabinet, local elections are under way amid documented pressure in the north. The president and prime minister have accused Serbia of meddling in the ballot, the United States has, in recent weeks, publicly signalled its impatience with Pristina’s political paralysis. In that environment, laundering a BIA tasking through a portal and TV studios is not a sideshow. It is a vector of power.

There is a simple corrective. If Zeka believes he is the journalist he says he is, he can publish the full, unedited audio, verify its provenance with independent forensic experts, disclose his funders, and show the emails that demonstrate his early approach to prosecutors. If he will not, then editors across Kosovo should stop booking him as a source and start treating him as what the record increasingly suggests, a media broker who sells narratives to the highest bidder, and in this case helped carry the payload of a hostile intelligence service into Kosovo’s public square.

The courts will decide what is criminal. The rest is a question of standards. The line between journalism and influence operation is not a blur, it is a choice. In late September, “Pa Rrotlla” made its choice. On 9 October, the state made one, too. The next ones belong to prosecutors who must follow the money and the media, and to the editors who still offer Milaim Zeka a microphone in a country fighting, every day, to keep its democracy from being written by someone else.

Key sources: Special Prosecution arrest and detention announcements; contemporaneous reporting on Nenad Rasic’s election as deputy speaker; Kosovo leaders’ warnings on Serbian interference; “Pa Rrotlla” publications; and televised interviews where Mr. Zeka describes his role and the provenance of the materials. Also, RFE/RL; AP; KOHA; Kallxo.com; Telegrafi and The GPC I Unit International Sources Familiar with the matter.

By the time he appeared on T7 that night1, his version of events had already shifted. In his morning statement2 he claimed that the documents in question had come from Fatmir Sheholli, supposedly via “GIZ Germany”. Later he said he had verified nothing, adding that he could not read Serbian. Yet sources familiar with him briefed Gunpowder Chronicles that Zeka does, in fact, speak fluent Serbian. He also told police that he had contacted Chief Prosecutor Blerim Isufaj to hand ove…

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It was in the shadow of this culture that a small Balkan province became a theatre of French influence. Kosovo, once a region of Serbia, erupted into conflict in the 1990s. By 2008, amid war and devastation, it had declared independence. At its helm stood Hashim Thaçi, a man who embodied the contradictions of his country’s rebirth. Once known by his nom de guerre, “the Snake,” Thaçi was leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a paramilitary group of 15,000 men branded terrorists by the West, and later transformed into the nation’s first Prime Minister. He was, in the words of one former French intelligence chief, “turned into an agent.”

Pierre Siramy, who served 25 years at the DGSE, including as chief of staff for intelligence, described how the agency made a calculated choice: “It was decided at the highest levels of the State that we would support Thaçi. Yes, I can tell you that a French intelligence officer turned him into an agent.” He suggested that beyond diplomacy, the DGSE facilitated Thaçi’s access to weapons, discreetly, through channels shielded by official denials. The former minister of defence, Alain Richard, says he recalls nothing. But an arms dealer, caught on tape years later, claimed the DGSE gave him the green light to supply Thaçi’s fighters with RPG-7s and munitions. “It was French policy,” the man shrugged.

Thaçi’s rise was also stage-managed in subtler ways. In February 1999, at Rambouillet1, where peace talks were meant to end bloodshed, the French state formally backed Ibrahim Rugova, a soft-spoken intellectual with a francophile heart. Yet Thaçi, representing the camp of war, edged into prominence. Arnaud Danjean, a young DGSE officer fluent in Serbian and now a European Parliament deputy, was assigned as Thaçi’s handler. He recalls it differently: “The France did not recruit him. He was a contact. A source. He would tell us things about his organisation. We would file reports. That was it.” He insists the relationship was informational, not operational. But the line between the two remains blurred, especially when those reports traveled up to the highest levels of the French state.

By the time NATO bombs fell on Belgrade in March 1999, Thaçi had transformed from “terrorist” to “interlocutor.” And when Serbian forces withdrew three months later, it was Thaçi who calmed Kosovar anger against French troops, viewed by many as pro-Serb. “The Snake had shed his skin,” one observer said at the time. Soon after, Thaçi became Kosovo’s first prime minister, his legitimacy cemented by the West.

Yet shadows clung to him. In 2010, a report by Swiss senator Dick Marty accused Thaçi of leading a mafia-style network that trafficked drugs, intimidated rivals, and even orchestrated the disappearance of hundreds of Serbs, Roma, and Albanians. The report alleged links to organ trafficking2. “The heroin trade was violently controlled by Hashim Thaçi,” Marty wrote, describing him as “the most dangerous of Kosovo’s mafia bosses.”

Among his fiercest critics was Gani Geci, once a fellow KLA commander, nicknamed the “Rambo of Drenica.” In his village, Geci recounted how he narrowly survived an assassination attempt orchestrated, he believes, by Thaçi’s men. “They tried to kill me,” he said, lifting his shirt to show scars. “I lost two of my men, my friends. They died. I was shot, but I survived.” Geci named Thaçi’s uncle, Azem Sula, long-time head of Kosovo’s intelligence services, as the man who financed the attempt. “Here, you cannot trust anyone but family,” Geci said, flanked by his armed nephews.

Excerpt from the documentary at minute 21:44, featuring Gani Geci’s story. This segment is shortened by 2 minutes and 49 seconds from the original cut3.

Thaçi’s inner circle, including Kadri Veseli, later head of the Kosovo Assembly, were also accused in Marty’s report of leading what was described as a clan-mafia nexus. Veseli publicly denied the allegations, calling them “harmful to the image of Albanians and Kosovar politicians.” But the allegations lingered, reinforced by decades of rumour, by whispers that journalists, activists, and opposition figures had disappeared during Thaçi’s rule.

By 2007, Thaçi was elected Prime Minister. In 2008, he declared Kosovo independent. And for more than a decade, his grip on the country remained unshaken, reinforced by Western backers who preferred stability to inconvenient truths. Then, in 2020, Thaçi was indicted by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague, charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Today, the question is not simply whether Thaçi was a French agent, or whether Paris looked away from his alleged crimes. The larger question is whether Kosovo’s fragile state, birthed in blood and shadow, has merely traded Serbian repression for rule by its own predators. Two decades after the war, Kosovo teeters between independence and renewed dependency, its political landscape still shaped by the ghosts of the KLA and the compromises of the West.

And so the questions cut like wire: if parts of Dick Marty’s most explosive claims were never substantiated in subsequent proceedings at The Hague, was the entire saga a DGSE provocation gone awry, a Serb operation by design, or the handiwork of undercover cut-outs we’ve yet to map?

Who choreographed the leaks, the denials, the strategic silences and why?

What we do know already is this: a dossier of Hashim Thaçi’s landmark policies and agreements with Belgrade praised by some as “normalisation,” condemned by others as quiet capitulation effectively widened Serbia’s leverage over Kosovo’s territorial, institutional, and economic arteries. And there is more. The revelations we have been given access to suggest that Thaçi’s “land-swap” territorial project was not his alone but part of a clandestine French plan, cultivated under President Emmanuel Macron’s support, in which Albania agreed to act as broker under Prime Minister Edi Rama in exchange for French backing of Albania’s EU membership bid. Right ahead of this project, the most serious opponent to its implementation Albin Kurti and his Movement for Self-Determination, faced an orchestrated attempt to crush his party from within. Senior officials defected en masse to the newly formed Social Democratic Party of Kosovo, the PSD, all but one. According to our sources, that last holdout refused and was killed, in prison. These revelations will lead to more unfolding unknown, unheard-of, but whispered and long unverified claims.

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What El Español reported?

In short: the Spanish piece portrays Sahitaj not as a lone conman but as the node of a hybrid criminal-intelligence structure.

• A multi-jurisdictional lifestyle of Bentleys, Lamborghinis and high-end watches at a Marbella property searched by UDYCO in December 2020, assets vastly disproportionate to any declared income.

• A criminal network that specialised in extortion of wealthy targets, using forged or quasi-official paperwork and the threat of extradition or legal trouble in Russia to extract payments. The chain of intermediaries included Baltic/Estonian operatives and men who acted as on-the-ground enforcers.

• Connections, documented in police files and surveillance logs, between Sahitaj and Russians described as operatives or intermediaries with ties to the GRU/FSB, including meetings in Switzerland shortly before Sahitaj’s December 2020 arrest. El Español frames those links as part of a broader pattern of Russian influence and state-backed criminal protection.

• A Málaga court process (oral evidence concluded and a sentence drafted at the time of reporting) in which most defendants admitted membership of a criminal organisation; the paperwork and witness testimony compiled in Spain portray the enterprise as transnational and sophisticated.

Put bluntly by El Español: Sahitaj lived like an oligarch on the Costa del Sol with no legitimate declared income and investigators describe a structure that blended mafia techniques with corrupt access to judicial apparatuses in Russia to terrorise victims into paying.

Why this matters for Kosovo (and The Hague)

El Español’s Marbella dossier is not an isolated “mafia” tale. When read alongside our own investigations, the picture that emerges is a hybrid operation that can be used as a tool of political warfare: buy or coerce testimony, plant fabricated intelligence, generate kompromat, and disseminate it via media proxies to delegitimise judicial actors. That’s precisely the pattern we began to detect when a mysterious Facebook account »“Laky Laky”« tried to hand us an apparently forged dossier and even offered money to publish it3.

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How Gunpowder Chronicles was targeted (what we experienced)?

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Extraordinary claims seldom announce themselves with footnotes, and this one is no exception. But timing is a character witness. In Washington, the President has just invoked a half-century-old emergency valve in the District of Columbia Home Rule Act Section 7402 to wrench …

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Isufaj, faced with pointed questions from journalist Kreshnik Gashi, repeatedly oscillated between technical legalisms and vagueness, attempting to justify a sequence of actions that, when laid bare, appear deeply damaging to Kosovo’s national security and public trust. At the heart of the scandal lies Milan Radoicic, a known criminal figure, accused terrorist, and admitted organiser of the Banjska assault.

"Veç fakti se Milan Radojqiqi ka deklaruar publikisht që e ka organizuar Banjskën dhe ai sot qëndron në Serbi. A ka argument më të madh se mas ksaj qëndron shteti Serb" | "Just the fact that Milan Radoicic publicly declared that he organised the Banjska attack and that he is still in Serbia. Is there any stronger argument that behind this stands the Serbian state?"

This unequivocal admission by Isufaj should have been the foundation for a rigorous legal offensive. Instead, the public would later learn that Radoicic’s arrest warrant was briefly withdrawn under opaque circumstances, allegedly in exchange for information about the 2018 assassination of Oliver Ivanovic3.

According to Isufaj, the case prosecutor Burim Çerkini claimed that Radoicic would cooperate if the arrest warrant was lifted:

"Avokati i Radojqiqit kishte thënë prokurorit çështjen se Radojqiqi po jep sinjale bashkëpunimi..." | "Radoicic's lawyer told the prosecutor that Radoicic was giving signals of cooperation."

That cooperation never materialised. Radoicic never presented himself to authorities. Instead, he returned to the shadows, and eventually to Serbia, untouched. Meanwhile, Isufaj now distances himself from the decision:

"Procedurën e ka zhvilluar prokurori i çështjes... prokurorët janë të pavarur" | "The procedure was led by the case prosecutor... prosecutors are independent."

This legal technicality, wielded like a shield, conveniently divorces the Chief Special Prosecutor from accountability. But throughout the interview, Isufaj concedes that he was informed at every step. His argument collapses under its own contradictions. To the public, this was not legal nuance; it was betrayal.

In a country as politically fragile as Kosovo, the mere perception of complicity or negligence in matters of national security is devastating. Isufaj's defence that lifting the arrest warrant was part of a strategy only deepens the concern. Who approved it? "Një instancë më e nalt" | "A higher instance," he says, without naming any official, thus creating a ghost chain of command that allows no scrutiny.

This shadow governance, shrouded in phrases like "nuk mund të ndaj me publikun" | "I cannot share with the public,” defies democratic accountability. If the legal system is to be weaponised through secrecy, then the very foundations of rule of law in Kosovo are compromised.

Perhaps the most damaging moment of the interview came when Isufaj was asked whether he expects Milan Radoicic to ever be extradited: "Nuk besoj kurrë" | "I never believe so."

Here lies the indictment not just of Serbia, but of Kosovo’s own institutional impotence. If the chief prosecutor of the Special Prosecution believes, with apparent resignation, that a central figure in one of the most violent anti-state operations in Kosovo will never face justice, then what remains of deterrence? What remains of sovereignty?

But the rot goes deeper. Isufaj is also accused of inaction by his own peers. Former prosecutor Sylë Hoxha claimed that political actors pressured him to withdraw Radoicic's arrest warrant and denounced interference from "njerëz të parapolitikës" | "parapolitical figures."

Isufaj dismisses this, asking: "Pse s'i ka arrestu këta njerëz?" | "Why didn’t he arrest those people?" This retort evades the real issue: the presence of influence operations within the justice system. Rather than investigate Hoxha’s claims, Isufaj turns the lens back on the whistleblower.

His cavalier deflection has become a motif. When pressed on the implications of the Prime Minister and President refusing to support his candidacy for Chief State Prosecutor, Isufaj scoffs:

"Mirë çë s’më duan. S’prish punën" | "Good that they don’t want me. Doesn’t matter."

But it does matter. The refusal to appoint him is rooted in allegations of bias, political proximity, and the very handling of the Radoicic case. His dismissiveness underscores a dangerous lack of institutional humility.

Isufaj also stood behind a wall of technicalities regarding investigations into the Kurti government. When asked why some cases receive urgent raids (such as in the Ministry of Agriculture) while others, like the Ministry of Infrastructure, appear to stagnate, he said:

"Rastet kanë specifika të ndryshme..." | "Cases have different specifics..."

The response is at best evasive, at worst a signal of selective prosecution.

When it comes to matters of state security, Isufaj claims he has no intelligence:

"Unë nuk kam informacione të tilla" | "I have no such information,"

- he says about threats of further violence in the north. Yet he is also the man who has signed multiple arrest warrants for suspects involved in the Banjska plot and other destabilisation efforts in the north.

What emerges from this one-hour conversation is a picture of a prosecutor who is either overwhelmed by the institutional rot he is meant to combat or actively preserving it under a veneer of legality. In both scenarios, the result is the same: the erosion of Kosovo's justice system and its national security.

The broader geopolitical context only heightens the stakes. Serbia, emboldened by Western inaction, has deepened its ties with Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran. The Banjska attack was not an isolated paramilitary adventure; it was a Kremlin-scripted provocation, facilitated by Belgrade and executed on Kosovo’s soil. That the man who orchestrated it walks free under Serbian protection, while Kosovo’s own institutions flounder in ambiguity, is not just a legal failure. It is a national humiliation.

And in that failure, Blerim Isufaj bears direct culpability. Through inaction, equivocation, and a reckless reliance on procedural opacity, he has weakened Kosovo’s prosecutorial integrity, undermined public trust, and offered a gift to those who seek to dismantle Kosovo from within.

In a nation where impunity is a slow death to sovereignty, Blerim Isufaj has not merely hesitated at the gates. He opened them.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LEDGER

The first arrest warrant for Milan Radoicic was issued in 2019, following suspicions of his involvement in the assassination of Serbian politician Oliver Ivanovic in January 20184. Ivanovic, a prominent Kosovo Serb leader and outspoken critic of organised crime in the north, had publicly identified Radoicic as a key enforcer of Serbia-backed mafia power structures in Mitrovica5. He was gunned down in front of his party headquarters6. During a police raid on Radoicic’s home later that year, he fled, later releasing a statement via Srpska Lista’s official channels claiming that the Kosovo authorities had attempted to assassinate him7, painting himself as a nationalist martyr rather than a murder suspect.

In March 2021, the arrest warrant was quietly and inexplicably withdrawn, despite the case remaining unresolved8. The timing was highly suspicious. It followed the 2020 indictments of Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, and others9 by the Hague’s Specialist Chambers10. According to sources independently verified by The Gunpowder Chronicles, Radoicic’s legal exposure suddenly became his leverage. He began trading sensitive information in exchange for immunity. What did he offer? Classified Hague witness files and critical intelligence that could potentially sabotage the prosecution of Thaçi and Veseli.

These documents, according to sources in London and continental Europe, originated from Serbian intelligence, passed through Radoicic’s channels, and were ultimately delivered to Veseli’s operatives, namely Nasim Haradinaj and Hysni Gucati of the Kosovo Liberation Army War Veterans’ Organisation. This illicit exchange, our sources allege, was facilitated by Agim Veliu, then Interior Minister in the 2020–2021 Hoti administration. Though from the LDK, Veliu is widely viewed as a Thaçi loyalist. He reportedly made repeated, undocumented visits to northern Kosovo, meeting with Belgrade-aligned authorities under Radoicic’s control. These meetings, observed by Western sources, yet never publicly acknowledged, exposed the dual reality of a Kosovo whose government claimed sovereignty, even as its officials colluded with a criminal underworld tethered to Serbia’s deep state.

The most visible consequence of this alliance emerged in September 2020, when a masked individual—believed to be linked to Radoicic, delivered leaked Hague files to the KLA War Veterans’ Organisation. The organisation then attempted to use these Radoicic-sourced documents to undermine the course of justice, prompting the Hague to act swiftly by charging Haradinaj and Gucati with six counts, including obstruction of justice, intimidation, and breach of confidentiality of proceedings11. According to the KSC indictment, between 7 and 25 September 2020, the two held press conferences and disseminated protected information, making disparaging accusations against (potential) witnesses and seeking to undermine the court’s work. They were sentenced to three years in prison.

Meanwhile, Radoicic moved with increasing impunity. In February 2022, another arrest warrant was issued, this time for witness intimidation in the Brezovica corruption and illegal construction scandal12. But in July that year, he was seen openly at barricades in northern Kosovo, despite being a wanted man, protected once again by Srpska Lista, which confirmed his presence.

In December 2023, a third warrant followed, this time for orchestrating the armed attack in Banjska, a deadly paramilitary assault in northern Kosovo that Radoicic himself publicly claimed responsibility for13. Although a trial is now underway in Kosovo, only three people have been arrested. More than 40 others remain at large including Radoicic, believed to be under protection in Serbia.

And in April 2025, a fourth arrest warrant was issued, this time accusing him of war crimes against civilians in the Gjakova region during the 1999 war14.

THE THAÇI APPARATUS LIVES ON

That Blerim Isufaj still holds the office of Chief Special Prosecutor is not merely a symptom of institutional inertia, it is a political statement. Despite lacking the confidence of both President Vjosa Osmani and Prime Minister Albin Kurti15, neither of whom has endorsed his continued mandate, Isufaj remains in place: defiant, unmoved, unaccountable.

The question is no longer "how" but, why?

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The case against citizen Mentor Llugaliu, dismissed first by the Basic Prosecution in Prishtina and again by the Appeal, ought to have been closed, a simple matter of law correctly applied. Both prosecutorial levels found no crime in his social media criticisms. The legal definition of harassment was not met. But for Kusari, the law itself became secondary. The decision was not a legal setback; it was an affront to her authority. In her public statement of 31 July2, she all but declared war on Kosovo’s judiciary, openly shaming the prosecutors by name: Kushtrim Zeka at the Basic Prosecution and Shkëlzen Brahimi at Appeal. NGOs sympathetic to her followed suit3, demanding the Kosovo Prosecutorial Council evaluate their performance, an unsubtle call for punishment.

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This was not an act of transparency. It was intimidation in broad daylight. By naming prosecutors individually and framing their legal judgment as dereliction of duty, Kusari sent a message for the second time within a month to the prosecutorial body at large: side with her, or risk your career. In a small judiciary already burdened with political pressure, such tactics function as veiled threats. When the next prosecutor faces her file, they will do so under the shadow of professional ruin, aware that if they refuse her demands, they too may be paraded before the mob as enemies of justice.

Kusari’s manoeuvre cannot be separated from her connections. She has cultivated close ties with the Devolli network, the oligarchic power whose grip on Kosovo’s political and media landscape was laid bare in last week’s joint investigation by Osservatorio sui Balcani4 and EurActiv5. That report6 documented how the Devolli brothers, through Klan Kosova and other outlets, systematically censored journalism to protect their business empire while deploying media as a weapon against government institutions. Journalists described direct instructions not to report on scandals that touched Devolli’s interests. Entire programmes, like Jeta Xharra’s “Jeta ne Kosove,” were axed after crossing the wrong family7. This is the company Kusari keeps and protects.

Her silence following the investigation speaks louder than her endless rhetoric about harassment. At a moment when credible journalists exposed the suffocating stranglehold of business interests on Kosovo’s media and democracy, Kusari offered nothing. No condemnation, no solidarity, no outrage. Instead, she poured her energy into vilifying Llugaliu, a single citizen who dared criticise her online. She has never hesitated to weaponise her status to shield her allies in Klan Kosova or the Devolli empire, yet she shows fury only when her own name is on the line.

The hypocrisy is glaring. Kusari, a woman who sits on the anti-SLAPP steering committee in Europe, has adopted the very same playbook she claims to fight. She filed a criminal complaint against a critic, orchestrated international endorsements to pressure prosecutors, smeared her target as a partisan operative, and when the courts rejected her case, turned her ire against the judiciary itself. It is the anatomy of a SLAPP, only cloaked in feminist rhetoric and international credentials.

Her allies in civil society, including QIKA and the Rrjeti i Grave Gazetare, have amplified her narrative, reducing complex questions of law into slogans about violence against women. The vulgar and hateful comments cited in her complaint are indefensible as discourse, but the legal test is not about taste, it is about crime. By insisting that prosecutorial rejection of her claims constitutes negligence, these organisations position themselves not as advocates for justice but as enforcers of Kusari’s personal agenda. Their statements naming Zeka and Brahimi are chilling: they transform legal discretion into grounds for professional punishment, collapsing the independence of prosecution under the weight of political theatre.

The danger here is systemic. If Kusari succeeds in bending prosecutors through public shaming, she will establish a precedent where international prestige and oligarchic ties override the legal framework. In Kosovo, where corruption has long hollowed out institutions, this is not a mere dispute between two citizens. It is an act of sabotage against the rule of law itself. Every prosecutor who observes Kusari’s ability to marshal NGOs, media, and international networks into a chorus of denunciation will think twice before crossing her or those she protects. Justice becomes no longer a matter of codes and statutes, but of who holds the loudest megaphone.

Kusari’s conduct reveals a pattern of selective outrage. When Devolli interests suffocate journalists, she is mute. When the reformist government resists the old guard, she sides with the past. And when a citizen calls her “Mickoja” online, she launches an international campaign, dragging prosecutors through the mud and demanding institutional heads roll. The proportionality is grotesque, the priorities distorted beyond recognition.

This is not advocacy. It is the appropriation of legal systems and civil society for personal vendetta and oligarchic protection. In the name of defending press freedom, Flutura Kusari is dismantling the very foundations that allow it to exist. In Kosovo, where democracy hangs by threads, such behaviour is not merely hypocrisy. It is corruption in motion, dressed in the respectable clothes of human rights.