Peje/Pec police station. Picture: BIRN.
A Peje/Pec police station inside report, seen by BIRN, has revealed that over round one decade, from 2012 to 2023, cops and administration on the station had not processed over 380 potential felony and civil violations in addition to inside disciplinary instances.
The continued prosecution investigation has revealed that cops and administration systematically did not ahead instances to the Peje/Pec prosecutor’s workplace, successfully bypassing their authorized obligations by protecting the information in station drawers as an alternative. The statute of limitations for a lot of of those instances expired in consequence, stopping additional prosecution and leaving alleged offenders free.
By February 2025, authorities had compiled a listing of 197 felony instances that weren’t submitted on time. They embody a variety of potential crimes, equivalent to theft, minor bodily damage, fraud, harassment, assault, firearms offences, arson, unlawful building, customs evasion, threats, property harm, endangerment of public security, counterfeiting and unlawful playing.
“Many of those [cases] had been lacking bodily information, regardless that they had been listed as open within the police system,” the report, seen by BIRN, reads.
The remainder of the instances embody 186 civil complaints, consisting additionally of inside disciplinary issues that had been left unprocessed by the station management.
The report has not but resulted in indictments or the arrest of these accountable. To this point, the cops suspected of being accountable for these actions haven’t been suspended or arrested.
The Kosovo Police Inspectorate, IPK, confirmed that it’s conscious of the allegations in opposition to Peje/Pec police station, however refused to supply any additional data to BIRN “for the sake of preserving the integrity of the investigative course of”.
The IPK mentioned the uncared for civil complaints and inside disciplinary instances had been forwarded to the Directorate for Inside Investigations for dealing with, however “weren’t correctly processed on the native stage”.
The difficulty was revealed by probability in 2024, when the police station in Peje/Pec submitted a felony report back to the Peje/Pec Fundamental Prosecution. In line with the report, seen by BIRN, prosecutor Dorian Juniku found that the case had already breached the statute of limitations as a result of it was filed to the prosecution after the deadline.
In November 2024, Juniku then requested an investigation into the police station’s dealing with of different felony instances. “The State Prosecutor requested that we consider whether or not any potential violations by police officers from the Peje Investigations Sector could have occurred,” the police report, obtained by BIRN, states.
The Peje/Pec Fundamental Prosecution advised BIRN in a written response that “the case is at the moment present process investigative actions [in cooperation with the police inspectorate]. The accountable people have been recognized, and preliminary suspicions encompass the felony offence of Abuse of Official Place or Authority.”
Peje/Pec police station Commander Idriz Atashi reportedly found the information and forwarded them to the IPK for overview, mentioning extended inaction by the station’s administration.
In an official e-mail, seen by BIRN, Atashi emphasised that these lapses “mirrored a failure of the station’s management to make sure correct dealing with of instances”, including that some points had been probably recognized to the administration however had been ignored.
“Along with 186 local-level instances, residents’ complaints and disciplinary measures weren’t addressed by the commanding workers of the Peja Police Station-cases [and] neither submitted to me nor declared till I personally found them,” Atashi wrote in his e-mail hooked up to the report.
The report additionally incorporates explanations supplied by police officers for why they didn’t ahead sure instances to the prosecution. One officer reportedly said that a number of the case information had “been combined up in his cupboard along with his private belongings,” which was why he didn’t ahead the information of suspects who had probably dedicated crimes to the prosecution. In one other instance, a police officer mentioned some case information “had been taken by one other officer”.
