On the evening of Friday 31 August, the 50-year-old Albanian HATIJA Alket, known in his homeland as one of the "drug lords" and sentenced, returned to Italy escorted by personnel of the International Police Cooperation Service of the Central Criminal Police final of 2017, to twenty years' imprisonment, as a skilled organizer of the trafficking of large quantities of narcotic substances such as heroin and cocaine destined for the Italian market and in particular for the Milanese hinterland.
The investigations conducted by the International Police Cooperation Service, together with the Carabinieri of the Milan Investigation Unit, and coordinated in Albania by the Security Expert operating in Tirana allowed the Albanian police to arrest HATIJA already in July 2017, thanks also to the contribution of the Italian Liaison Magistrate in Albania.
Unfortunately, however, a decision of the Court of First Instance of Durazzo, at that time, denied the extradition of the "drug lord" to Italy, believing that he had already served his sentence for the same crime in Albania.
The decision of the Court of Durres was overturned, in 2021, by the Court of Appeal of the same city which, with a sentence also confirmed by the Supreme Albanian Court, in September of the same year, ordered the execution of the extradition procedure of the convicted person.
However HATIJA Alket managed in these situations to lose track of him, until the day of August 30, when he was arrested again by the Albanian policemen.
The extradition of a character of the stature of HATIJA Alket constitutes yet another excellent operating result, the result of the now increasingly consolidated collaboration between the Judicial Authorities and the Italian and Albanian police forces, a tangible sign of the high professionalism put in place in the common goal of fighting organized crime and international drug trafficking.