The Man Who Survived the Assassination Manual
Following our report on "Thaçi’s Assassination Manual," a new witness emerges. He doesn't just theorise about power, he details the prison cell and the "state-sponsored frame-ups" used to silence him.
On 4 February 2026, we published an investigation I knew would not land as a normal story. We titled it “Thaçi’s Assassination Manual”1, and we framed it carefully. Not as a verdict, not as a court finding, but as a method we had reconstructed from testimony, documents, broadcast material and institutional records. Our argument was narrow in claim and wide in implication. In post-war Kosovo, we wrote, power could be consolidated through a repeatable sequence that blended selective violence, intimidation, narrative engineering and pressure on investigative processes. We called the climate this produced an “assassination atmosphere”. The point was not spectacle. The point was a system that teaches people what it costs to dissent and what it pays to comply.
That investigation grew out of a separate line of reporting we began tracing in April 2025, when we started pulling at a thread about efforts to undermine the Kosovo Specialist Chambers process in The Hague2. As we mapped names, incentiv…
