The Skopje court intends to hold a hearing in the 2012 Good Friday massacre on September 18th, when judge Ognen Stavrev announced that he will listen to the audio recordings proposed as evidence by the Special Prosecutor’s Office.

The case was tried already and a group of ethnic Albanian islamists were sentenced to life in prison for killing four Macedonian youngsters and an adult man on the eve of Good Friday in 2012 in an apparent attempt to spark a civil war. But in 2015 SDSM party leader, now Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, claimed that he has recording of phone conversations that would throw a different light on the case. Zaev used the threat of publishing the recordings, which he said would cause ethnic instability in the country, during the political crisis he sparked. The case was re-opened and given to the Special Prosecutor’s Office, an office close to Zaev which is now thoroughly discredited and may end up losing the case before the hearing is up.

Shortly after Zaev assumed power, the four defendants, which include one of the three shooters (two of them are hiding in Kosovo) and accomplices were released from prison. This was one of the main request of the Albanian political parties who conditioned joining Zaev’s coalition.
Zaev has so far rejected public and private please from the families of the murdered boys to release the tapes, or at least tell them what’s in it. Given his documented distortion of other recordings, the public grew deeply cynical over the case and the long teased major announcement allegedly contained in the tapes.

Judge Stavrev, who is seen as reliably pro-Zaev, said that the tapes contain private and intimate discussion and that only select portions will have to be aired before the entire public. Stavrev was handpicked to go after former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, easing Zaev’s take over of the Government.