The Minister of Public Order is unanimously excluded from the race for the head of the Tirana PS Socialists decide: Poçi out of the party He ignored the PS’s request to choose for himself one of the positions he holds Page 3 -

Yesterday, the Albanian Minister of Public Order signed the dismissal of a police chief who, a few days earlier, had been taken hostage by a gang group from a peripheral town. In fact, the group of armed young men, equipped with the comforts of “suspected mafiosi,” reacted after the new police chief shattered their provincial “myth” through his conduct and actions on the street. The police chief himself made a mistake upon taking charge of the police station, when he thought that the key to success was violence and radicalism. However, when the sensational incident led to his return to the police station, and when the state sent substantial police forces to his aid, which struck the perpetrators on more than a few occasions, the truth was manipulated and, consequently, politics found an excuse to use the political gathering, although the pretext was an anti-state and anti-law act (!). From that moment, among those with a cool-headed view, the idea took hold that the police chief, now dismissed, had overstepped his authority, and that his challenge or ambition to confront the reality he had found had been unfortunate. The ruthless exploitation of the case by politics has been just as evident on other occasions. In the incident at the Laç police station, it can be said that his dismissal would have been more effective if it had taken place on the very first day of the sensational incident, on the basis of a credible administrative reason. But the incident itself serves as a stimulus for another repeated precedent involving the Albanian police. Veteran police experts—in other words, born professionals—often refer to a chronology of acts that have destroyed the authority, dignity, independence and professionalism of the Albanian police. In this chronology, the first precedent in the sequence remains “2 April in Shkodër,” after which the Albanian police developed a complex about being commanded according to the political climate and not according to the “polar star” of duty. This chronology may also include the fact that the police, one of the fundamental pillars of the state, still have no special status in this country. In the most compromising manner, the political sides that insist on a change of government continue, during their election seasons, to repeat the precedent of devaluing, misusing and using the police. In this reality, which has unfortunately remained unchanged, there is the inherited example of a macabre squandering of this police force’s energy on rallies, meetings and the endless shuttling of political motorcades, which never give up their game of rolling over and trampling the law. Both camps, in their own cynical way, are repeatedly caught red-handed using the names of a few police colonels and majors, forgetting that, in the strategy of their election promises, “the independence of institutions” is the most important passage in their “gospel” or “Quran.” But, despite this sold-out morality, citizens’ trust and sense of security continue to be troubled by the fate of the Albanian police having its epaulettes torn off and its “hat removed”—more by the street and politics than by the offices.

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A woman had been arrested, suspected of a murder, but she denied it. After spending two months in a cell, she complained that her hair was falling out. The investigator told her that, to recover from the illness, she had to confess to the murder. The woman chose her hair, spent one night with her lover and ... was sentenced to 10 years in prison The unusual story of an investigation Page 7

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