Former police officer Igor Spasov, sentenced to 14 years in prison for the horrific murder of 22 year old Martin Neskovski in 2011, was arrested owing to a police report made by his girlfriend. Spasov received lenient treatment from the Zaev regime after he was used to willify VMRO-DPMNE, and used it to flee from prison in 2018. He was given legal representation by Zaev’s personal lawyer Vane Andreev and later he was given a lengthy medical leave – from which he never returned to prison. An arrest order was issued but by then Spasov had fled the country.
He was arrested by Bulgarian police in Sofia yesterday afternoon, after his girlfriend reported him for violence. He lived in the Mladost part of the Bulgarian capital, and reportedly he entered the country from Turkey. The details of his movement after he fled Macedonia are still being determined. Macedonian authorities are now about to initiate a procedure to have him extradited to serve the remainder of his sentence. It is still unclear whether Spasov has also been able to obtain a Bulgarian citizenship – if he has, it may be difficult to have his extradited.
In 2011, Spasov attended the large celebration of the VMRO-DPMNE party election victory, as did Neskovski. According to eye-witnesses Spasov, a special police unit member, got into several altercations with the frail Neskovski, and at one point attacked him and savagely beat him to death. He then left the main Skopje square and did not report the incident, even after Neskovski’s body was discovered and kept quiet during several days of chaotic attempts to identify the killed person and the killer. The late missing person report by Neskovski’s family and the fact that a carnival was in town as well as a number of foreign sports fans added to the confusion and the police initially believed that the body is of a foreign national.
SDSM accused the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party and Interior Ministry officials of trying to cover up for Spasov, who was arrested within days and quickly sentenced to 14 years in prison. In 2015, SDSM leader Zaev released an illegally recorded conversation between then Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska, edited out of context. A comment by Jankuloska that “I’m upset, you can’t cover up a crime” was portrayed by Zaev as her attempt to cover up the murder. The release of the tape was used by SDSM to rile up major protests in Skopje and to attempt to storm the Government building, during which dozens of officers were injured.
Years later, the full tape was released and it shows how Gruevski and Jankuloska clearly didn’t initially know who killed the boy, and that once they found out it was a police officer, working to make sure that he is brought to justice. Jankuloska’s comment is clearly understood to mean that Spasov was trying to cover up what he did, not her or officials in the Ministry. It’s just one of the highly emotional cases which SDSM used to enflame the Colored Revolution which were later completely debunked.
Comments are closed for this post.