Police officer Mitko Pesov, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison as a “terrorist” in the April 2017 trial, was sentenced using evidence which the prosecutors themselves later threw out, says his defense team.
Pesov is sentenced that he performed a crime of terrorist endangerment of the constitutional order and the security of the country by inaction. In the first phase of the trial, the prosecutors insisted that Pesov had the so-called silver command authority that day, that he received an order from his superior, then Interior Minister Agim Nuhiu and failed to execute it, and that he was not in Skopje on the day of the incident but in Kavadarci. But, the prosecutors themselves later threw their own evidence out the window. Pesov had no command authority. Nuhiu himself denied giving an order to Pesov, the officer’s defense attorney Pance Toskovski said in a TV interview.
Pesov is one of the 16 opposition activists and police officers who were sentenced in the case over the April 27 2017 incident in the Parliament. The case was used by the Zaev regime to blackmail a group of members of Parliament into voting in favor of renaming Macedonia. They received amnesties for their services, while the common protesters and the police officers who were overwhelmed by the protest sparked by Zaev’s move to elect a new Parliament Speaker received lengthy prison sentences. Former Interior Minister Mitko Cavkov is chief among the arrested police officials, and the draconian sentence was attributed to his work in investigating past corruption scandals by Zaev.
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