How bid to kick out one-legged killer from Albania has cost us £100k
Proof Britain’s lost its marbles
A ONE- LEGGED Albanian killer yesterday cited human rights laws as he made a last- ditch bid to avoid extradition.
At great expense to the taxpayer, Saliman Barci, 41, stepped up his battle to avoid being sent home to serve a 25-year sentence for two horrific murders.
The married father of three claims he would be killed as part of a ‘blood feud’ if he was returned there.
It was also alleged that Barci, who lost a leg in a motorbike accident, would be vulnerable because of a lack of health facilities in Albanian prisons.
Officials confirmed last May that he had been granted legal aid to fight extradition. His barrister yesterday declined to confirm whether the taxpayer was still funding his quest to stay in the UK.
But the estimated cost of trying to extradite Barci is around £100,000.
Barci ‘deliberately misled’ UK immigration authorities with a false alias and passport after gunning down two men in northern Albania in 1997, an earlier court hearing was told.
Posing as a Kosovan asylum seeker, he slipped into the UK while on the run and lived on benefits for 14 years before his true identity became known. By then, he had been awarded British citizenship.
In July, two months after a Daily Mail investigation exposed the case, a district judge ruled he should be extradited. But at the Court of Appeal yesterday, Barci, of Northolt, West London, challenged the decision. The convicted murderer, currently in custody, was not in court as his barrister Ben Cooper argued his proposed extradition to Albania would be in breach of three articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, right to life, ban on torture and fair trial.
It was claimed on his behalf that the Albanian judicial system was ‘endemically and systematically tainted by corruption’. Mr Cooper, an expert on extradition and human rights, claimed the judges who found Barci guilty in his absence of the murders were ‘implicated in corruption’.
The Court of Appeal was told that extradition should be barred because of a real risk to Barci’s life in Albania as a result of a blood feud.
The barrister added: ‘The culture of its prisons is considered inhumane and degrading. Cold cells, absence of natural light and less than two metres living space.’
However, Daniel Sternberg, on behalf of the Republic of Albania, which contested the appeal, submitted that Barci’s retrial would be conducted in the Albanian appeal court and not by the judges who originally tried the case.
‘There has not been any proven allegations or active allegations of corruption against the judges,’ he said.
He added that there was no corroboration for the claims relating to a blood feud, lack of protection or lack of assurance. ‘These submissions are built on sand,’ he told the appeal judges.
Barci is said to have lured his two victims to their deaths in the city of Burrel, northern Albania. He fled the country in the wake of the killings but in his absence was sentenced to 25 years in 2009. He was arrested here in July 2015.
Judgement in his appeal bid was reserved yesterday.
From the Mail last May ‘Submissions built on sand’