Thaçi’s Assassination Manual

Thaçi’s strategy transformed Kosovo into a coercive state, where "assassination atmospheres" were manufactured to justify neutralising opponents and trapping loyalists in a cycle of debt.

In April 2025 our newsroom began pulling at a thread¹ that kept resurfacing in different forms and different places. It was a claim that a Russian Serbian Kosovan entangled network had been tasked, by Hashim Thaçi and associates, with undermining the Kosovo court process in The Hague. That work started as a national security story and it stayed one. But as we mapped names, timelines and incentives, we kept returning to an older question that Kosovo never fully answered after the war. How did power consolidate so quickly, and what did it cost.

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 …