Agim Ismailovic, one of the three indicted perpetrators of the 2012 Good Friday massacre, fled from the Skopje courthouse today and was on the loose for hours before being arrested. Ismailovic was sentenced to life in prison, but was released into house arrest in 2017, when the newly established Zaev regime sent the case to re-trial.
Republika was told that Ismailovic attended the hearing today and that at one point prosecutor Fatime Fetai, a loyalist of the Zaev regime, asked that he and another defendant, are sent to prison since the trial is at an end. Ismailovic then asked for a break to go to the bathroom and never returned. The Interior Ministry told Republika that they are currently looking for him, and hours later it was reported that he was found in his home and arrested.
Ismailovic was part of the Islamist group that killed four Macedonian teenagers on the eve of Good Friday in 2012. The boys were directly targeted hanging out near the small Smilkovsko Lake just north of Skopje, along with a 45 year old man who happened on the scene. The victims were Filip Slavkovski (18), Aleksandar Nakevski (18), Cvetanco Ackovski (18), Kire Trickovski (20) and Borce Stevkovski (45).
Releasing Ismailovic and his suspected accomplices was one of the key demands of the ethnic Albanian parties in 2017, whose support Zoran Zaev needed to win power, and he was himself spreading speculation that there is some “new cache of evidence” in the case that he will make public. Zaev later testified that he has no new evidence in the case.
Besides Ismailovic, two other direct perpetrators of the machine guns massacre – his brother Afrim Ismailovic and Alil Demiri – fled Macedonia shortly after the killings and are believed to be in Kosovo. Three accomplices were detained and sentenced to life in prison in Macedonia.
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