By Haqif MULLIQI. Stories from the war diary
One of the most interesting and perhaps even more spectacular stories of the war in Pristina is that of March 1999, when, in the Emshir neighborhood (today Calabria) of the capital, Dragan, the most notorious policeman of Pristina, was killed. Dragan, together with two other policemen, who had secretly entered the house of a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Mehdi Asllani, and his soldier sons (I had met Bekim in the glorious battle of Qafë e Kaqanolli a few months before the Emshir story) believing that they would carry the action to the end without any problem, since the family was sleeping. But, I read in a play by a famous Albanian author that: “In war, people are killed when it may seem illogical to be killed, and sometimes they are saved when it is illogical to believe that they can be saved.”
To reprint this story, like a Hollywood movie drama, I wrote to PLAKU (as we called Mehdi during the war) on Facebook with the idea of publishing it as an extraordinary story about a true and unrepeatable event, but he did not reply. But, I would not have believed that I would find his name on one of the lists of “lying veterans”.
God bless you, because so much is rotten in this country of ours.
My friend Mehdi Asllani, our wise and brave Elder, may you be one of the living legends of the KLA. My respect for you and your family will never be torn from my heart.
THIS IS HOW THE MURDER OF DRAGAN, THE MOST NOTORIOUS POLICEMAN IN PRISHTINA, HAPPENED
While the war had engulfed most of Kosovo, however, in parallel with the lethargic life that our capital’s citizens had been leading for months, there was a war on the gray stage that was most often suspected, but also around which various stories were woven – credible and unbelievable. They were the SKIFTERAT, an elite guerrilla unit commanded by the Llapi Operational Zone Headquarters, the boys and girls of the capital who were waging their difficult and unpredictable war, which had one goal: to strike at the brain of the enemy’s operatives, the brain of the UDB.
In addition to these, the boys and girls of this famous guerrilla unit set up ambushes and organized dozens and dozens of successful actions, causing irreparable damage to the Serbian State Security forces in Pristina, but also annihilating several dozen police officers in prayer, who were “distinguished” for the rampant crimes against Albanian civilians in Pristina. Meanwhile, one of the most hated names of the Serbian criminal forces in the capital was that of Dragan, the policeman who was uniformed by the Serbian authorities due to the fact that he was a well-known ordinary criminal from Pristina and a pathological Albanianophobe.
His murder came very deservedly at a time when the SKIFTER guerrillas had already devised a plan for his capture, but, as will be learned from this story that will follow below, in a very interesting and dramatic story, in which the prominent Serbian criminal deservedly paid all the revenge he had against the people of Pristina, since his name had become an emblem of Serbian crime in Pristina and the surrounding area. Rightly so.
FIRST MEETING WITH ASLLAN ASLLANI
It may have been March 4 when Muharrem (Indriti), a friend of mine from Pristina, came and invited me to my apartment in Bregu i Diellit in Pristina. This was my apartment that not many people knew about, for security reasons. Muharrem told me that some of my old friends and associates, members of the National Movement for the Liberation of Kosovo, wanted to meet me urgently. In fact, almost a month had passed since the LKÇK, precisely on May 11, 1998, had signed the agreement with the KLA General Staff to merge all its military personnel into the KLA, but at the same time exercise the right to maintain political subjectivity.
I don’t know if Muharrem (a bakery owner on ‘Xhemail Ibishi’ Street in Prishtina) was a member of the LKÇK or not, but I had no doubt that he was an ardent sympathizer of this organization and the KLA. After all, since October 1998, when the LKÇK people had appointed Muharrem as my liaison and that of these Freedom Fighters, I and this handsome, extravagant guy, with very long, blond hair, night and day, whenever work and need required it, would drive to Gallap in his car.
While, not infrequently, I would also meet other people from the war right at his house. Most often with the fighter Rrahman Dini “Bali”, also a member of the LKÇK. In fact, Muharremi once told me that sometime in the eighties his brother had served with Rrahmani and had been imprisoned and sentenced with him. Meanwhile, I had known Rrahmani for a long time and he was the man who had directly connected me to the LKÇK and with him I had done some pretty dangerous illegal activities, I would say.
In any case, on March 4, with Muharrem, but also my brother, Haki, and Qemail Jashari, also a brave fighter from Drenica, who on March 5, 1998 had managed to break the siege of the Jashari neighborhood of Prekaz and cross over with Bashkim Jashari, we arrived in Zllashë, where the headquarters of Brigade 153 was, as well as the headquarters of the LKÇK leadership, at the head of which at that time was my friend Valoni, Valon Murati.
Of course, due to my frequent trips to Gallap, I also knew many of the soldiers of the 153rd Brigade there, which was led by the excellent soldier Adem Shehu, one of the unforgettable leaders of the KLA in these parts. And one of the soldiers I met that day was Cani. Cani was from Pristina, and the only thing I knew about him was that he was a soldier, but in the Llapi Operational Zone he also had his brother Bekim, with whom we had met at Qafë i Kaçanolli in September 1998, in the famous KLA battle, when, precisely, for the first time since the beginning of the war, the KLA members managed to break the Yugoslav Army, forcing it to retreat shamefully and causing it indescribable losses in both men and equipment.
After I had finished work in Gallap, where I had agreed with the commanders of Brigade 153 about some special things and obligations that I had in the capital, and after spending that night in a village hall traditionally arranged for those parts, the next morning early, again with Haki and Qemajli, we set off for Prishtina. We even left before dawn, because we knew that the Serbian police at that time, usually, neither ambushed nor checked the roads. At least not the roads that we frequented, because they knew that there were people threatened with danger.
So, we returned to Pristina, not suspecting that a day or two later, a truly unusual event would happen to Can, that young soldier from Pristina, whom we met in Gallap, and he, together with his father, uncle Mehdi, Mehdi Asllani, whom we all knew by the combat name PLAKU, due to his age, would experience an event that would be talked about and rumored in the capital and beyond, and which would add to the eternal glory of this generous and patriotic family inspired by the idea of patriotism and the ideal of FREEDOM, dressed in the garment of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
But what is it actually about, and who and how did he kill the most notorious policeman in Pristina, a former servant and then a Serbian thief from the capital, who spoke Albanian fluently, and even more so knew the people well, because he was born and raised in Pristina, among Albanians? So, who killed this son of a bitch, who for years had brought the soul of Pristina youth to the tip of his nose? Who killed the Serbian criminal named Dragan?
CAN’S RETURN HOME
“CANI, Fitimi, his friend, and Kushtrim, my youngest son, were sleeping in the same room,” Uncle Mehdiu recounts. “My wife and I kept watch that night until morning. We knew that we were being watched and all the signs told us that there could be an intrusion into our house. Moreover, my wife had the strongest instinct that the wolves would ‘visit’ us. Asllan, that is, Can, my son, who was a soldier in the Eastern Front of Llapi, precisely in Gallap, had come that day from the mountains and we had advised him to rest that night.
In fact, I had sent word to Can to come to the house, because it was obvious that something could happen to us and I called him to see how we could deal with it together. My wife was not aware that I had called Can and under the pressure of premonitions that we could have a confrontation with the wolves, that day she had told Can that she had not done well to come. ‘Did you go to the mountains or “No?” she asked the boy. “If you have decided to go, then continue to stay and fight there, because there is a lot of danger from the police in the city.”
Cani and I looked at each other, behind her back, and smiled to each other. In fact, the woman was right, but my idea was that together with Cani we would try and evacuate the family somewhere safer, because it was obvious that the Chetniks knew that the three of us, Cani, Bekim, had already joined the ranks of the KLA and that something unforeseen could happen to the whole family.
The Chetniks, everyone knows, are merciless. They kill both women and children, without distinction. Their war, as we have known and as it was proven, is a dirty war. A cannibal war, I would say,” says PLAKU, adding: “But my main fear, but also Cani’s, was what if the Chetniks took action that very day. How? Finally, do you fight with children on foot?
Every time the boys came to me from the ZO of Llapi, meaning from the war, we would stand guard for two hours, in a row. But this time, my wife and I decided to stand guard ourselves.
“To act as a guard,” Uncle Mejdiu continues, “I had a ‘Scorpion’ while Cani had two bombs under his pillow.”
My lady accompanied me throughout the night. We were sorry to wake Can, because just a few hours earlier he had been brought from Zllashi by one of his guerrilla comrades, Kujtim, Kujtim Pasjaça, through whom I had actually sent word to the boy among the Gallapi fighters.
“In addition, I think it is interesting to note that Cani, thinking that his commanders would not release him to be deployed in Pristina because it was a very dangerous period of time, nevertheless misled them by asking him to come to Pristina to be checked by a doctor. There was also a complete justification in the fact that Cani had a metal rod in both legs and told his commanders that he had leg pain and that he urgently needed to come for a medical check-up,” PLAKU recounts.
Thus, Cani manages to escape to the capital, to his Emshir neighborhood, where he was born and spent his entire life, never suspecting that just one day later, together with his father, he will perform an unprecedented feat of bravery, worthy of the heroes of rhapsody.
WHO WAS KNOCKING AT THE DOOR THAT EARLY MORNING?
“We couldn’t even suspect,” Cani continues, “that what happened could happen on the very day it did…
The memory brought me back to that night and, since I was really tired, because we had done a lot of military activities in the mountain that day and at the same time I had walked a lot, I lay down to sleep.”
Meanwhile, according to both Mehdi and Can’s accounts, the OLD MAN followed Fitim around 6 in the morning, because he had to go to work. “They apparently waited for the three of us to gather at home: me, Bekim, and Can,” Mehdi further recounts. “They undoubtedly had reliable information that both boys were at war, which I cannot say for myself, because I often, since I was in the organization in the Karadak Operational Zone, came here, that is, at home, stayed two or three days, went to Zllashë, Gjilan, Prizren, Pashtrik, Planejë, etc., because I had certain desires, and first of all to organize a supply corridor from Pashtrik to Dardana (former Kamenicë). That is, their people had often seen me and I moved around a lot, but perhaps because of my age they may not have suspected that I had also joined the KLA.
It was exactly 6:30 when I saw Fitim off. After seeing him off, I took another look around the house to see if anything had moved, but I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
It was Sunday, March 7, 1999. At half past six in the morning, dawn had descended on Pristina. From my previous experience, when I was a fugitive in 1974, I knew that the Schije usually make their sieges at dawn. In fact, they make their sieges a little earlier, at night, but they knock at dawn. They are cowards and have two things: they never go in small numbers and at night they never knock on the door of a house.
This may have fooled me. I thought, the day has fully dawned, and finally it is Sunday and they will not bother us that day. But, I just entered the house, when I went into the room to lie down for a while to rest, while Asllani was putting the “Scorpion” under the pillow, where, as I said above, he also had two bombs, while I also had my revolver, they seemed to sprout from the ground… I heard them for a moment when they knocked on the door.
It was a small knock, and not at all usual for the knocks of the Serbian police. I approached to see who it was through the glass of the door. My mistress reminded me that they were not the police, while I ignored the suggestion, telling her that it was impossible, because they come a little differently. “As soon as I opened the curtain to see who was knocking on the door that early morning, the thieves pointed their guns at me and kicked the door in, rushing inside,” Mehdi Asllani recounts.
I TOLD YOU, IT WAS ALL VERY INSANE
Then Mehdiu began to tell and describe how the police entered and where they were stationed. “Two,” he says in the continuation of his story, “entered straight into the boys’ bedroom and quickly reached Asllani, one of them entered from the left room, which I believe he had observed very quickly. And when the woman and the girls tried to enter the room where we were, the latter pointed his Kalashnikov at them and threatened them. While the fourth one put the barrel of the Kalashnikov to my chest. They simply caught us alive, which was the worst option for all of us, because we had never thought that this could happen.
In fact, Cani and I had made a plan that, if the police came to arrest us, one of us would open the door, retreat to the right where there was a chance of shelter, while the one who was in the room would shoot at those at the door and all together, then, we would try to retreat from the back of the house. However, as I said, the whole thing was very frantic, and we were deceived in advance by the, so to speak, normal knocking on the door of the police, and then by the way the first two policemen frantically entered the room where Cani was lying, who had not heard the soft knock on the door of the house at all.
Poende, Cani had been fast asleep and barely got up, while the third policeman, pushing me with the barrel of his Kalashnikov, brought me into this room. At first, I didn’t notice Asllan, who, surprisingly, didn’t wake up quickly and was holding my arm slightly to the side, hoping that he could shoot at the shkije and not harm me. When I turned my head, for a moment I noticed that Asllan was very confused, because even he hadn’t guessed that the shkije would catch him alive.
That Dragan, the black-faced one, ordered the other policemen to secure it. That was the worst feeling I’ve ever had in my life. It was a terrible feeling: we were soldiers and we were captured alive. But, as they say, when luck meets misfortune, when Dragan, with that other Chetnik, is about to tie Asllan up with brackets, they notice a part of the ‘Scorpion’, which had been discovered under the pillow. So they rush to take the gun from the boy and tie him up later.
They take the gun from Asllan, but, apparently, they also give him an idea at this moment and he frantically until Dragan grabs the ‘Scorpion’, who grabs the bomb. Asllan, as soon as he grabs the bomb, takes the fuse off it and throws the fuse on the floor. At this moment, when Cani takes the bomb, in the blink of an eye, the situation undergoes major changes.
The whole thing took a completely different turn, because Dragan threw the Kalashnikov to the ground, as well as Can’s gun, and, plagued by an indescribable fear, they tried to grab the boy’s hand, to seize it, to not give him space or the opportunity to let it go. The bomb was ‘with a spoon’, as we called it.
The soldiers were screaming in panic, shouting in both Albanian and Serbian. Dragan was telling Cani: ‘Don’t Asllan, don’t throw the bomb! We might get into an argument…! You might get into it too…!’ etc. etc.
And they made a mess near the bed where Asllan had slept, but it was true that they could not capture Can in any way. They tried to grab the bomb from him, but Can stretched out his hand across the beds and they could not grab it. Asllan cried out like a fairy: ‘Oh mother, take the children and get out, I will not surrender alive!’
He didn’t know that at the same time the fourth policeman was also targeting the woman and her two daughters. He must have shouted like that five or six times, but she, as I said, had no way of leaving the house, because a large, bald-headed man had locked himself in the room, which was made even bigger by the bulletproof vest and other elements he had on his body.
I know that he once again addressed me, saying: ‘Dad, come on, take the children and take them out!’. But, even the father was in vain, because I had the barrel of the Kalashnikov right in my chest and I couldn’t move, even though my eyes were constantly on the belt of the policeman who was guarding me, where I thought I could pull out his revolver at an opportune moment and shoot him. By the way, I could also see his eyes the whole time, but, surprisingly, he was somewhat cold-blooded and I didn’t really believe that I would manage to grab his weapon.
Meanwhile, the one who was standing at the door of the wife and daughters held the Kalashnikov pointed at the room, but he was nervous and extremely scared, because he kept turning his eyes to see how the event was developing. He too was waiting for the moment when the bomb would explode. It was clear that he was more of a coward and out of fear, fortunately, he had forgotten to release the trigger of the Kalashnikov.
However, in his panic, he pulled the trigger of the weapon he was holding in his hands several times, and when he realized that there was no escape from the situation here, he wanted to kill the wife and daughters, but, out of panic, as I said, his Kalashnikov was restrained and, fortunately, he could not fire it.
I tried to look both at Cani and at his wife and children. While Cani was in a real mess and the boy was being beaten with two sticks, on the other hand the wife and daughters did not make a single sound. That’s how we taught them not to make a sound in case of danger, because we were all in danger.
“To be honest, I felt really sorry for my wife and daughters, because I kept thinking that maybe that dog would remember to pull out his gun and kill them. But, fortunately, it seems that he slipped away after a while, as if he had become convinced that his gun had a defect. This is the luck of the draw. As I said, the guy in front of me didn’t even look at me, even though we were all in danger inside, because the bomb could have hurt us all,” Mehdi Asllani recounts.
It is perhaps interesting to note that during all this time, Kushtrim, Mehdi’s youngest son, was lying on the sponge on the floor where the thieves found him lying when they entered. What a mess it was inside and with what dizzying speed things were happening, Kushtrim had gotten out of bed, and had left the house, unnoticed by anyone. He had stopped on the bank of the river that runs near the house and, then, all the while, had watched how this event was unfolding, which resembles the most interesting Hollywood films and the fluidity of which only the brilliant screenwriters of American films can conceive.
ASLLANI, AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, DELAYED AND INTERMEDIATED WITH THE SKIERS
“Dragani,” Cani also relates in the conversation, meaning Asllan Asllani, the brave former KLA fighter, “was shouting in Albanian: ‘Asllan, I saw God, don’t let go of the boom and don’t ruin us all!’ Shkau was terrified.
“To be honest, from the concentration I had with that pig holding the barrel of a gun to my chest, I didn’t notice at all how and where Trimi came from. I was still surprised when he later told me that he had stood up and just like that, he had left the house,” Mehdiu, this brave man from the capital of Kosovo, continues to recount.
“Asllan was pushing and shoving as hard as he could with his spears. At one point, I thought about grabbing one of the spears and taking it off the boy’s back, but it didn’t occur to me that I could do anything, because they were too wide, because of the bulletproof vests and other equipment, and I knew that I couldn’t do anything, while this spear from behind would certainly kill me.
At this moment I decided to use a kind of ‘politics’ and in a very sharp and loud voice I told the police: ‘Release the boy because I’ll calm him down’. This talk suited them very well, because they believed that they could deceive us like this and without asking the policeman who was guarding me whether I had permission or not, I dodged a little towards Can and the two criminals. I approached Asllan, whom the policemen released, and he turned.
For a moment, without the policemen hearing me, since I knew he was there, I quickly put my hand under the pillow and grabbed Can’s other bomb. I quickly returned to that ‘my’ pig who had been keeping me in the crosshairs the whole time. I wanted to pull the fuse out of the bomb in front of his nose, but… unfortunately, the index finger of my right hand, which was sore from time, didn’t work for me and I couldn’t remove the fuse. The fuse was too tight. Then, when I found myself in this completely unexpected situation, I lowered my hand so that the guy couldn’t see that I hadn’t pulled the fuse.
At first, I’m sure he didn’t notice this fact either, because, like the other squirrels, he panicked and started screaming at the top of his voice: ‘Throw it, throw it!’
I noticed in his eyes that his pupils were getting bigger and it was clear that he wanted to pull the trigger on the Kalash. But he didn’t think of doing that, because, although he had some suspicion, he still didn’t know whether I had pulled the trigger on the bomb or not. He was afraid that if he killed me, the bomb would fall between us and throw him into the air too.
On the other hand, I didn’t have time to put my finger on the safety and pull it out of the bomb. While, for a moment, I somehow managed to pull out one of the safety pins, but the trigger, snatched it, hit the barrel of the Kalashnikov in my hand and threw the bomb to the ground. It was locked with a safety and did not fire. It was now clear that the trigger would not wait any longer, but would execute me on the spot. So, with my left hand, furiously, I raised the Kalashnikov up. The Chetnik’s Kalashnikov fired at the ceiling. I, I don’t want to lie, at that moment I did not hear the crack of the Kalashnikov at all.
“The moment Cani heard the sound of the Kalashnikov, he threw the bomb he was holding onto the bed, then grabbed Dragan by the arm and placed him on top of the bomb. Then he jumped on top of him, not allowing him to move,” Mehdiu recounts.
WHEN THE BOMB WAS DEtonated, IT SEEMED TO HAVE CUT OFF THE DRAGON’S WINGS.
“God gave me the gift. After I dropped the bomb on the bed, I grabbed Dragan by the arm and laid him on the bed, that is, on the bomb. Here, the strength that I had accumulated long ago when I practiced bodybuilding came into play, but also the desire to defeat evil, to defeat the black Serb inside out,” Cani recounts.
“When I threw him at the bomb, he screamed a little a couple of times, but it seemed to have become discouraged. He was terrified, and just before the bomb went off, he lost all his strength. The dog was shaking like a birch in water. I had it easy to hold.
When the bomb went off, it seemed to have torn Dragan’s arms off. Then I stood up and slammed Dragan into the back. He was still alive. And I quickly went back to find any of the weapons. And I found the ‘Scorpion’.
I heard the gasp from the explosion of the bomb. The room was filled with noise. At this moment, while I held the trigger of his Kalashnikov up with my left hand, with my right I took the revolver from his belt, the one I had been contemplating for a long time a moment ago, and I brought its barrel close to his mouth and fired it.
The trigger went dead and started to fall towards me. This surprised me, because I was expecting it to fall in the opposite direction, according to inertia. I pushed the trigger back and turned and called out to Asllan: ‘Can, father, are you okay, my son!?’
‘I’m fine, dad, fine!’
I asked Asllan three times if he was okay.
It is interesting that the other policeman, the one who was trying to defeat Can with that kind of Dragan filth, at the moment when Can threw the bomb at Dragan, he had taken out his revolver to shoot the boy, but as fate would have it, when the bomb exploded under Dragan, it hit him in the hand that was holding the weapon, but also in the head, as well as in other parts of his body. If the bomb had not exploded for even a single second, he would certainly have killed Can. Later, our comrades in the KLA saw that this Chetnik’s revolver was also ‘wounded’. It seems that the fragments of the bomb had knocked it out of his hand. Fate, oh!
When I found out that the boy had escaped, I approached Dragan, because I was afraid that he would kill my son, even though he was wounded by the bomb, and I fired another bullet at him. He took charge. I satisfied the son of a bitch. He himself had been looking for trouble and he found it perfectly. I made his head spin.
“While the other shooter, who wanted to kill Asllani behind his back, had risen to his feet and started to leave the room. I followed him and caught him in the other room. I also shot him in the head, which also hit him in the head. I also made a hole in his head. He also paid part of the Serb debt in Kosovo,” says Mehdi Asllani from Pristina, a former member of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Meanwhile, I remembered the shooter, who was aiming at my wife and children. When I returned, I noticed that he had run away in fear and gone outside.
In fact, he tried several times to shoot his wife and daughters, but again, due to the fear and panic that had gripped him, he was unable to free the weapon and use it.
In fact, it is an interesting detail that after the triggerman made several attempts to shoot at the woman and the girls and the gun did not fire, the woman then took a muddy slipper and threw it at the confused and terrified triggerman, shooting him in the head. Thus, as I said, the Chetnik leaves the house, dripping wet from fear.
Now I noticed that I too, from the bullets of the Kalashnikov rifle I had raised up, had been wounded on the top of my head. The bullet had probably returned from above. It wasn’t a very dangerous wound, but blood was flowing freely.
“While some fragments of the bomb had also hit me in the body. But, to my surprise, none of the wounds hurt me,” the old man recounts.
INJURY OF THE FOURTH POLICEMAN
“When my father returned from the other room, where he killed the third culprit, I asked him if the job was done. He said yes. Now the question was what to do with the fourth culprit, who managed to escape,” says Cani.
“When the shikku came out,” continues the OLD MAN, “I knew that he could call for help, via radio, so that other shikkus would come. Then I ran through the rooms and went to the old bathroom and opened the window to see where the shikku was. The truth is, I thought the bathroom window would be closer to the police car,” says Mehdiu.
But, in the meantime, while I was running through the rooms to the bathroom, Cani grabbed the “Scorpion” and went out the door. The Chetnik had taken refuge at the end of the wall, trying to fix the Kalashnikov. Furthermore, Kushtrim, who was watching all this from the outside, says that the bullets were pouring out like a kollomoc when the grains fall. Simply put, the Serbian policeman was completely terrified.
When Cani came out the door, he noticed the trigger and fired at him. As fate would have it, the bullets from Asllan’s gun hit the criminal and knocked him down.
“Then,” Mehdi Asllani continues his story, “when I opened the window, the wounded man had changed position and had come out behind their “101”. He noticed me, but he could not raise his weapon against me. I raised my revolver and fired a bullet at him. He probably took him in the jaw and knocked him down again. Ah, I said, it’s a good thing I killed this son of a bitch too.
After two or three minutes I noticed that the trigger had caught on the car’s bumper and had stuck its head out to look. I took it in my sights again. I wanted to take its head, because it was quite a big head, but this time the gunman shot me in the head and the bullet didn’t go off. To be honest, these blackfaces should have been killed right in the head, because they were wearing bulletproof vests, which means they were protected.
When I returned to Cani, he had already turned the key in the room and taken his walkie-talkie, some prisoner clamps, magazines, etc. Then, together, we gathered all the weapons and keys we found there. It was strange that we were so cool-headed. We just didn’t know where Kushtrim was, who we knew had gone outside.
Then we quickly got dressed and decided to leave with my wife and children. Now, according to the plan we had made much earlier, we would continue to implement Plan B, that is, the evacuation from Pristina. This was not easy, because we had to withdraw quickly and safely, while we did not have many options. It really helped us a lot that we had planned this segment in advance”, says Mr. Mehdi Asllani, while the issue of evacuation is truly a special story, an event with many vicissitudes and drama.
THE VORTEX OF MISINFORMATION AND UNTRUTH AS THE STORY OF A CRIMINAL’S MURDER
The police and some foul-mouthed Albanians, after this event, as usually happened to change the truth, made a series of constructions. The reason was very simple: this true heroism of the KLA members had to be tarnished and minimized. Thus, for illustration, first the Serbian mass media released information that the murder of the policemen had been committed by Mehdi and Asllani, meaning father and son, members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Then, the next news was that the murder had been committed by Asllani and Bekim, meaning Mehdi Asllani’s other son, for whom in this case it was not mentioned that he was a member of the KLA with his father and brother, but they had added that they had committed this with some minors. Then, correcting themselves, they emphasized that they were talking about Asllani and Bekim with some friends, cigarette smokers, people from the ‘Albanian mafia’.
“They talked and came up with many versions and of course we laughed at all of them. They said that there were two policemen killed and one wounded. They also said that we had waited for them in treachery and had killed them, etc. But, in the end, they were completely irrelevant. The most important thing was that they came to capture us alive, while we killed them and showed them that members of the Kosovo Liberation Army do not surrender easily and that they know how to hit the bull’s-eye even in the middle of the city,” concludes his story Mehdi Asllani, the OLD MAN, who, when at the end of September 1998 in Abri, Drenica, Serbian criminals massacred the Deliu family from this village in Drenica, in the presence of more than 20 men, had sworn that he would avenge the family of Diturie Deliu, the six-week-old baby girl whose mother’s throat had been slit by the bulls.
This was confirmed to me by many of the soldiers when two days after the incident I went up to Gallap again to meet with Commander Adem Shehu, Fatmir Humolli, Istref Klinaku, Sejdi Veseli, Valon Murati, Sali Mustafa-Cali, Kujtim Pasjaca, Shefqet Humolli, Agim Kuleta, Bahri Gashi, Osman Shahini, Fatmir Sopi, Isa Kastrati, as well as my other friends and comrades.
And, while I was talking to my friend Rrahman Dinin “Bali” about the Emshir case, because I didn’t understand much of what had happened on the day when the policeman, the black trash, Dragan, perhaps the most miserable in all of Pristina, was killed, as if from nowhere, first Cani and then Plaku appeared before me, with whom we agreed that one day, in Pristina and a free Kosovo, we would tell this story to the public. And we did so one night in September.
When we parted ways, Cani, as simple and unimposing as he is, joined his peers in the city’s favorite cafeteria, while Mehdi Asllani, the Elder, a former member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who with his son Asllani marked a true epic in the clash with Serbian criminals.
Source
