Even after Verusevski’s shock confession, prosecutor Fetai says that his illegal wiretaps should still be used as evidence

Prosecutor Fatime Fetai, who was one of the top deputies to disgraced Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva, said that the major blow against their cache of evidence inflicted by former spy chief Zoran Verusevski will not affect the on-going trials.

Verusevski shocked the public earlier this week when, while testifying in court, he said that the tapes used by the SDSM party to assume power were “heavily modified”. Verusevski was pointed out as the leader of the rogue group of intelligence officers who abused the surveillance systems and recorded conversations of leading politicians. The SPO was founded to investigate the tapes and used them as evidence to prosecute hundreds of officials from the VMRO-DPMNE party, meanwhile elevating the SDSM party to power.

I read what he said, that the “bombs” were modified and compromised. I want to point out that defendants never repeated the claim that the tapes were “cut up, pasted and edited” in court, even though they say that in the public often. At this point Verusevski’s statement is still not given in full. For us, as prosecutors, the authenticity of the recordings is not in doubt and it was not in doubt for the witnesses or the defendants. We also have additional evidence to back up our charges, Fetai said.

In reality, defendants routinely challenged the request to use these illegally recorded tapes as evidence in court, but judges, pressured by the Government, would find that the this practice is admissible. Some of the tapes, such as the one SDSM used to claim that the VMRO-DPMNE led Government tried to cover up a police brutality murder of a youngster, were already debunked. In others, SDSM claimed that they contain evidence of corruption, vote rigging and violence, while VMRO officials insisted that the tapes are taken out of context, spliced and edited.

In another shocking reversal that happened this week, Janeva’s defense team now demands that secretly recorded conversations of her, asking for a bribe from businessman Jordan Orce Kamcev, are not used as evidence against her.