TIRANA, Oct 6 /ATA/ Minister of Interior, Bledi Çuçi, in a televised interview, explains why he proposed Gledis Nano at the helm of the State Police as successor to Ardi Veliu.
Minister Çuçi listed some priorities that lie ahead of the new State Police director general, he also spoke about the recent crimes in the country calling them desperate attempts of organized crime to find new avenues in narcotics trafficking.
FULL INTERVIEW
Mr. Minister, what was the reason you proposed to Prime Minister Rama Gledis Nano as director of the State Police?
Gledis Nano is a career officer in the State Police and I believe he is the right person due to the energy, responsibility he has shown in performing the task and for this he has been widely praised for his results as director of the of Anti-Terror Department. I think that Ardi Veliu has set the bar high in the State Police and in my opinion Veliu is probably the best director general of State Police in 30 years. So to sustain this standard, Gledis would be the right person who will push ahead with agenda and have equally good results in performance of the State Police in service of the citizen.
In the coming days you will introduce Nano as the new director of the State Police. What do you expect from him? Where should his work focus?
Neither more nor less than what we have set out in the governing program. First of all, it is about establishing control over the territory of Albania where the two main challenges are cannabis cultivation and crackdown on unauthorized constructions. I will ask him to prioritize the ambition for modernization of Albanian police, especially the use of digital technology, and this is a very big challenge, also my ambition as Minister of Interior, but also set out in the governing program to deepen the fight against organized crime. We have set a sound foundation for the fight against organized crime because we are already a reliable partner of all European countries and the US, with the State Police taking part in joint operations and investigations with law enforcement agencies of Western countries on an equal footing. I think that these will be the main pillars of the work for the new director.
With regard to cannabis, the plane that crashed in North of Albania two days ago was an attempt to transport cannabis, wasn’t it?
We will wait until the investigation to comes to an end. Of course it is not a plane that lands in a normal situation for tourism. It’s actually a desperate attempt. Investigations have found out that the aircraft is not registered, it is made in an artisanal way, ie it is not produced by the aircraft manufacturing office or industry. There is no serial number nor any data. The mode of transport it has turned to and the location point to the desperate routes that organized crime is trying to find for trafficking due to crackdown of the State Police on trafficking of narcotics and mainly cannabis.
You told the parliamentary security committee yesterday that during recent years there were zero attempts by dinghies to transport cannabis from Albania to Italy. But yesterday at the Hani i Hotit border crossing, traffickers smuggled more than 300 kilos of cannabis across the Albanian border. Is it a failure of Albanian police?
No. A single case is not enough to point the finger at the Albanian police. We all agree that drugs smuggling is a world phenomenon. All that matters is that we are fighting on uninterrupted war. We do not say that there are zero cases. This battle continues uninterruptedly. It is important that we have control over the territory as much as possible and this is one of the priorities of the government.
