At the court hearing into the 2012 Good Friday massacre today, the third in which wiretaps and intercepted text messages are being revealed, there was again little in the way of new revelations. The promise of evidence throwing a new light onto the case, which was made over and over again by Zoran Zaev, was used to release the Islamists sentenced for carrying out the murders of four Christian Macedonian boys and one middle aged man, and they remain free to this day despite the initial sentences of life in prison.

One text message that was exchanged between DUI party leader Ali Ahmeti and then Deputy Interior Minister Xhelal Bajrami, shows Bajrami informing Ahmeti that the killers appear to be professionals. Bajrami also tells Ahmeti that was assuring Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski that the killers did not want to provoke a religious war in Macedonia by insisting that they could have attacked a police station or armed Macedonian unformed men to do so. Ahmeti, who was himself a terrorist commander in the 2001 civil war, tells Bajrami that he also spoke with Gruevski and insisted that Albanians do not execute children and only attack uniformed men.

Other intercepts include a conversation between Alil Demiri, one of the three gunmen who has since fled to Kosovo and has still not been extradited to Macedonia, with an unknown person. Demiri is heard complaining about some food he ate and the prosecutors are still uncertain if that is a code or just another mundane conversation.

During the Colored Revolution, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev insisted that he has evidence that will throw a new light on the massacre, and used this to appeal to Albanian voters, playing on the card of alleged fake charges against the ethnic Albanian killers. Despite pleas from the families of the killed boys, Zaev spent years refusing to reveal details about the “new evidence” he allegedly has, and the court hearings now reveal little of interest for the case.