Why Edlira Qefalija’s Attack on the Gunpowder Chronicles Cannot Stand?
Instead of answering evidence on Zeka’s networks, assaults and Serbian funded deals, Edlira Qefalija resorts to insult and distraction, mirroring the tactics of Sahitaj and Perovic.
The chain of events is now clear enough. On twenty seven November the Gunpowder Chronicles published an investigation reporting1 serious allegations that Milaim Zeka had twice been beaten and once sexually abused by men described by multiple international sources as linked to the circle of former president Hashim Thaci. Before publication the newsroom wrote to Mr Zeka on ten and twelve November, asking whether he had suffered recent violence and whether anything had been reported to the authorities. Both messages were opened. Neither was answered.
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 Man Who Knew Too Much What Happened To Milaim Zeka
Once the man exposing everyone else, Milaim Zeka now moves through Pristina in shadows, bruised, silent, and ringed by rumours of beatings and betrayal today. — The GPC I Unit.
Edlira Qefalija Facebook Post, Nov 28, 2025.
Inside the Plot to Dismantle Kosovo’s War Crimes Tribunal
How a simple Facebook bribe unravelled into a scandal, unveiling a clandestine effort to sabotage Kosovo’s Special Chambers and destabilise a nation. — The GPC I Unit.
Double Dealing: A Journalist, a Fixer, and a Master of Manipulation
Unveiling Milaim Zeka’s role in manipulating Kosovo’s narrative, targeting the KSC in The Hague with a campaign of disinformation and deceit utilising Russian secret service assets and criminal ties. — The GPC I Unit.
Inside the Plot to Dismantle Kosovo’s War Crimes Tribunal
How a simple Facebook bribe unravelled into a scandal, unveiling a clandestine effort to sabotage Kosovo’s Special Chambers and destabilise a nation. — The GPC I Unit.
“Nuk e kam besu që qytetari i Mitrovicës kthehet në mentalitetin e Agim Bahtirit”, Milaim Zeka — Kanal 10.
Milaim Zeka’s Facebook Post — [https://www.facebook.com/milaimzekaobri/posts/pfbid0gHfLXgqUJGP7JJLoUCyXpehv4MPXfMoevjiSYUBfQqxQzu9ivizYvQnkp46CrCGPl]
M Zeka Facebook Post on Wartime Footage to RTS Zaric Planeta [PDF File]