Lawyers of Ahmet Emre Olur, the media spokesperson of exiled Turkish mafia leader Sedat Peker, said his swift extradition from Albania to Turkey broke Albanian law and ignored his right to claim political asylum.
Lawyer Arben Llangozi told BIRN that Albania had violated its own asylum law by not interviewing him in the presence of a lawyer and translator, and sending him swiftly back to Turkey.
“There is a legal obligation to interview someone who is asking for political asylum through a translator and lawyer. In this concrete case, the [asylum] request was not administrated,” Llangozi told BIRN. Olur’s lawyers tried to submit a request for his political asylum in Albania.
Some Turkish media have reported that Olur is an Albanian national but, according to documents BIRN has seen, he has a Turkish passport, valid until 2027.
Llangozi added that an asylum request was made to the Albanian Interior Ministry, Ministry of Justice, General Police and Border and the Migration Police.
State Police did not answer BIRN`S request to clarify the steps that the police had followed in the extradition process.
Albanian law on asylum says all requests need to be processed and evaluated. It says also that when individuals are trying to evade justice, requests are not accepted.
The Ombudsman’s Office said that it had “launched an administrative investigation, and is reviewing the documentation”.
The request that BIRN has seen said the stated reason for the request for political asylum in Albania was that deportation would endanger his life and that he felt discriminated against in Turkey due to his political beliefs.
According to Lawyer Llangozi, “Perparim Dema [head of the police in Tirana Airport], closed the doors and did not allow to request to be submitted”, adding that they had sued him for this reason.
The Turkish Interior Ministry said on Sunday that, on September 16, after Turkish Intelligence, MIT, and the Abu-Dhabi Embassy informed Turkish police that Olur would be deported from the United Arab Emirates, it was determined that he was going to Serbia.
“However, the Serbian authorities could not give a positive response to our deportation request, as he was an international passenger. The person, who was determined to be going from Serbia to Tirana, was taken into custody by the Albanian police on September 17 at Tirana Airport,” the statement said.
After his swift extradition, Peker’s lawyer, Ersan Barkın, told the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet that Olur’s extradition was legally dubious.
“Olur is accused of membership of a criminal organization. Currently, no one is under arrest from the Sedat Peker file. Therefore, in a file where there is no detainee, this accusation is a baseless accusation,” Barkın said. He added that the “red notice” for Olur’s arrest was also legally baseless.
The convicted crime group leader fled from Turkey in 2020 and now lives in the UAE after a year-long stay in Montenegro.
He made a series of corruption allegations against senior members of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, senior bureaucrats, businesspeople and journalists.
Peker previously posted several YouTube videos about the alleged illegal activities of politicians, business people, journalists and other individuals close to the President Erdogan and the AKP.
However, he later stopped his videos and also stopped using his own Twitter account after he said Emirati officials told him to refrain from posting videos for security reasons.
Peker now shares tweets from other accounts which reportedly belong to him or to people close to him, including Olur’s Twitter account.
Since a failed coup attempt in 2016, Turkey has been pressuring Balkan states to extradite Erdogan’s critics. So far, most Balkan countries resisted the pressure. Albania controversially handed over several Turkish citizens, however, including so-called “Gulenists” loyal to exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen and other fugitives.
Source: Balkan Insgiht
