Two days after his arrest, Kosovo court ordered the release of Alil Demiri, an Islamist murderer sentenced to life in prison for the killing of five Macedonians in 2012. The massacre, in which four of the victims were barely out of their teens, was carried out by Demiri and brothers Afrim and Agim Ismailovic, on the eve of Good Friday, reportedly as an attempt to spark a religious war in Macedonia.
Of the three killers, only Agim Ismailovic was detained and is serving prison in Macedonia, along with several accomplices, while the other two killers have spent over a decade safe in Kosovo, which refuses the extradition requests.
The horrific crime was abused for political purposes by Zoran Zaev, during his Colored Revolution campaign. Zaev insisted that he has additional evidence that will shed a different light on the murder – in an attempt to gain the ethnic Albanian vote, as Albanian parties and commentators accepted his conspiracy theory. After grabbing power in 2017, Zaev refused to provide his evidence – even when faced with the distraught parents of the murdered boys – and eventually acknowledged that he has no new evidence. He did order a retrial of the case, and the sentences were largely upheld, but the politisation of the trial likely disrupted the attempts to extradite Alil Demiri and Afrim Ismailovic.
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