“I know it. Mehmet Shehu was killed”
For the first time, his escort chief speaks
“That night in December 1981 I was there,” the memories of Këçira… Marashitari between the two Hoxhas began to tell from April 1975
KAPO DULLO
They ambushed him. They got out with machine guns and shot him. That was the only version author Vlladimir Kyrilov had decided to give for the death of Mehmet Shehu. 27 years ago, he, the chief of Enver Hoxha’s personal security, had written this in a secret report. But that was not the truth. At least, not according to what his friend, Shehu’s close companion, who had remained silent for a long time, told the newspaper “Gazeta Shqiptare.” “He killed himself,” he repeated every day after the dictator’s death. But only yesterday, for the first time, did he speak. “I know it, Mehmet was killed,” he says. They are words drawn out with difficulty, after a long hesitation, but they are not in the least doubtful. He said them in his small home, where he has lived for years in a neighborhood of Tirana. At first hesitantly, then with a firmer and firmer voice, until he said everything. “The General Prosecutor’s Office asked me about this too. I told them this. I also told that film man, Meditit[?], who came to ask me a few months ago. People think differently. Nobody wants to know, nobody is interested anymore.”
The old, battered streets of Tirana have told him a few things. At first, just a little, in fragments. Then, from one question to the next, the inexhaustible memory began to bring back the old journeys of this man, who served Hoxha all his life. “That night of 17 December 1981 I was there. I saw the car they had come in. I also saw where they took the body. In the morning, when the radio said the prime minister had killed himself, I was stunned. I knew it was untrue,” he recalls. He remembers finding the scene filled with Security and Guard personnel, how they would not let him get close, and how afterward he was ordered to keep silent. “They told us that was the Party line. Whoever spoke differently paid for it.”
In his account there are names, places, and fragments of the last evening. He mentions unusual movements in the Block, cars coming and going without license plates, and a clear disturbance in Enver’s house. “That night nobody slept,” he says. According to him, the event cannot be understood without the breakdown in relations between Shehu and Hoxha, without the harsh Political Bureau meetings, and without the public denunciation that was made of Mehmet’s family after his son’s engagement. “Those were black days. He was marked,” he says.
He also remembers the months that followed. “Everything was done to erase every trace. People were checked, relatives were questioned, mouths were shut. Everyone was afraid.” Later, he himself was set aside, watched, and had to live for years under the shadow of a secret he could not speak of. “I had sworn to remain silent. Now I am old. I have nothing left to lose.”
In this belated account, given almost unwillingly, what emerges is not only the story of a dark night, but also the mechanism of a power that invented its own truths. That is why his testimony carries weight: he was there, in the corridors of the event, between the two Hoxhas and close to the man who ended up being declared an enemy. What exactly he saw and whom he saw, he recounts in fits and starts, like someone still keeping an old fear. But the sentence remains clear: “I know it. Mehmet Shehu was killed.”
Former prime minister Mehmet Shehu