Who is Gerd Gjinarari (the General), arrested in Belgium?

Gerd Gjinarari, 52, known as “the General,” who was arrested a few days ago, had previously been identified by the Belgian authorities. In June, he was arrested by the Federal Police’s FAST team after the Italian authorities had issued an international warrant for his arrest over a murder committed in 1997. The circumstances surrounding his release after that arrest have not yet been made public.

Gerd Gjinarari had been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Naim Zyberi in a hospital in Italy in 1997. The 52-year-old was brought to Albania in 2014 to serve his sentence, but five years later he was released on parole by the Korçë Court, specifically on February 14, 2019, by Judge Markelian Kuqo. When, in June of that same year, the Korçë Court of Appeals requested that he be returned to prison, Gjinarari had disappeared without a trace.

Seven years after the decision that granted him his freedom, the authorities managed to locate him in Belgium, where he was arrested by the local authorities. Sources say that proceedings for his extradition to Tirana are under way, and that his return to Albania to continue serving his life sentence is only a matter of time.

Gerd Gjinarari, also known by the nickname Gerd the General, was sentenced to life in prison by the Milan Court of Serious Crimes, in a final ruling dating back to 2001, for the murder of Naim Zyberi.

The crime took place in 1997 inside a hospital in Milan. Gjinarari, together with Arben Grori, presented themselves at the hospital as Zyberi’s relatives. They entered the room where he was staying carrying a bouquet of flowers, inside which they had hidden the murder weapon. The execution was considered part of the bloody clash between rival criminal groups in Tirana in the years following the fall of the communist regime.

The Court of Appeals’ decision returning him to prison was also upheld by the Supreme Court, which rejected his appeal. The case later reached the Constitutional Court, where Gjinarari claimed that the decisions of the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court violated his constitutional rights. But on January 16, 2023, the Constitutional Court decided not to accept the case for consideration in a plenary session, closing off his final legal avenue. That same year, the Special Appeals Chamber also upheld the decision of the High Judicial Council to dismiss Judge Markelian Kuqo, following a proposal previously made by High Justice Inspector Artur Metani.

But who was Naim Zyberi, who was killed by Gerd the General?

At the beginning of the 1990s, Naim Zyberi was known as one of the capital’s powerful figures, a strong rival of another well-known name in Tirana at the time, Gaz Muça. Zyberi was executed on August 6, 1997, by three people, two of whom were Arben Grori and Gerd Gjinarari.

In the early 1990s, Naim Zyberi had managed to gather around him a group of young men who, according to the rules they had set for themselves, enforced their own law in the capital’s neighborhoods.

He was described as one of the attackers of Gaz Muça, an incident for which he was also arrested together with Franc Konomi, who was never known to have managed not only to get out of prison, but also to evade the revenge of the men from Bardhyl Street until 2010.

After the prisons were opened in 1997, Naim Zyberi, like many others, managed to escape his cell and regain his freedom.

But Zyberi would not escape revenge for the killings of Artur Grori and Gaz Muça. He was pursued to Italy by Grori’s brother, Arben, and the first attack was carried out in a bar in Turin, where Naim Zyberi was seriously wounded and, for that reason, had to remain hospitalized for some time.

He was even transferred to a hospital in Milan for more specialized treatment.

The fact that Zyberi survived did not cause the perpetrators to give up.

On August 6, Gerd Gjinarari, who was carrying a bunch of flowers in his hand with a pistol hidden inside, and Arben Grori, together with another person, entered the hospital room where Zyberi was staying and shot him dead. They were arrested by Italian police soon afterward. /albeu.com/