SPO prosecutors are having a hard time proving that the 2013 elections were tampered with

During the latest hearing in a trial intiiated by Katica Janeva’s Special Prosecutor’s Office that alleges election tampering, the witness testimonies again didn’t go the way of the SPO.

Prosecutor Lile Stefanova, from the now thoroughly disgraced unit, is still pushing the case against a number of top officials of the VMRO-DPMNE led Government, who are charged with allowing ethnic Macedonians from Albania to receive dual citizenship. Although this is common practice and even a source of price across the Balkans, and the numbers amounted to about 500 people, former Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva insisted that this swung the 2013 municipal elections in Macedonia and went after police official in the small city of Resen, where many Macedonians from the Albanian town of Pustec received their passports.

Acko Sekulovski, a witness called up in the trial because of his work issuing passports in the city of Kicevo, testified today that all applicants he handled in 2012 and 2013 were treated according to the law. Sekulovski said that he photographed the applicants, took their data and filed them. He denied taht there was anything improper in the procedure, and did not allege crimes on the part of his superiors, which is presumably the goal of the prosecutors. Another Kicevo based bureaucrat, Gazmend Rizmani, also testified that he processed the applications as provided in the law and was in consultation with his superiors, who had no objections.

A third witness, Zaneta Zaec, was likely the one who prosecutor Stefanova laid her hopes in. A Resen based official, she never the less said that only the approved applicants were given passports, denying the allegations that citizenships were given to ineligible applicants.
The one witness ho testified in favor of the prosecution so far, Agron Kranlievski – a policeman from Resen, was quickly found out to be an outspoken supporter of Zoran Zaev’s SDSM party and given the open partisan abuse of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, the defense asked that his testimony is disregarded.