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The Sun article reveals: Five former Albanian police officers join crime in England, gold for criminal organizations
2025-04-07 12:55:22 / AKTUALITET
Albanians rule the £5 billion-a-year British cocaine market with an iron fist and shamelessly flaunt their criminal fortunes. Now Albanian gangsters are even recruiting corrupt former police officers from their own country to join their criminal networks.
Albanians have taken control of the British cocaine market over the past two decades, having formed alliances with drug cartels from Latin America.
And former Albanian officers have been caught selling drugs and guarding cannabis farms in the UK. Experts say former police officers are a “gold mine” for Albanian mobsters in England because of their insider knowledge of how the police work to catch big-time traffickers.
Evrin Karamuço, a professor of criminology at the University of Tirana, told The Sun that former police officers act as “advisors” to gangs. He said: “There are cases where former officers have been dismissed for abusive behavior, corruption or links to criminal groups.
They have used their connections to the underworld to find new opportunities and have become key members of gangs. Some groups believe their knowledge of police tactics will help them avoid capture by British police.
"From some intercepts of Albanian law enforcement agencies, it is understood that they have become the most important instructors and advisors of criminals."
Last December, former Albanian police officer Igli Ajazi was caught with members of a large criminal group while in the United Kingdom on a visa to study criminology at Roehampton University in London.
Ajazi, who had worked as a police officer in Albania from 2019 to 2022, told the officers who arrested him that he was on a "career break."
He was caught when police in Swansea stopped a car linked to a London-based Albanian drug gang.
The 28-year-old's phone revealed messages about a large cannabis cultivation operation in the capital as well as horrific videos of child abuse, which he claimed were linked to his previous work.
Ajaz was sentenced to 20 months in prison suspended for two years, sent to a rehabilitation course and ordered to do 180 hours of community work.
Former police officer and football fan Admir Hidri, 25, paid a heavy price for his involvement with gangsters after he jumped from the window of a cannabis farm and broke his spine. Hidri, from Failsworth in Manchester, told the court he got into crime after borrowing money from an underworld figure to fund his sick mother's treatment in Albania.
He said he was forced to repay the debt by travelling to Britain to guard a house in Failsworth, where £70,000 worth of cannabis plants were found, TCH reports. Hidri was sentenced to two years and six months in prison, despite his claims that he feared for his life and had broken two vertebrae when he jumped out of a window during a police raid.
Another former police officer attempted to stay in Britain after a three-year sentence for cocaine distribution. Klisman Sykaj appealed against deportation to Albania in 2022, having entered the UK illegally 11 years earlier, been deported, but returned in 2018.
He was caught red-handed when British police raided his Nottingham flat in 2015 and found cocaine hidden in the stove. Sykaj claimed to have worked for Interpol, but later admitted the truth. After being deported and serving his sentence, he worked as a police officer in Albania, where, ironically, he transported prisoners.
He returned to Britain and was caught with forged Italian documents. He asked to stay, claiming he was being followed by gangsters, but his request was refused.
In April last year, Igli Duka, 24, was sentenced to two years in prison for growing hundreds of cannabis plants at an industrial unit in West Lothian. He claimed that a known gangster, whom he had previously arrested in his home country, had blackmailed him into working as a “gardener” on the drug farm.
A fifth, a former police officer, worked undercover to infiltrate the Albanian mafia but claims he became involved in drug dealing after his identity was revealed. Mauricio Malaj , 30, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence after being caught selling cocaine to crime bosses in London.
In 2021, his lawyer said he fled Albania for the UK after crime lords torched his father's car. Albanian drug gangs have now become synonymous with extravagant videos on social media, showing off their jewellery, cash and luxury cars. The most notorious is the Hellbanianz group, based in the Gascoigne area of Barking, London.
They benefit from the huge demand for cocaine, with around 2.5 million users in Britain, making this the most problematic country in Europe for cocaine consumption, and second in the world after the US.
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