Kosovo Albanians Confirmed as Having Assassinated Greek Intelligence Station Chief

Kosovo Albanians Confirmed as Having Assassinated Greek Intelligence Station Chief
Defense & Foreign Affairs Special Analysis - July 8, 2005 Friday

Exclusive. From GIS Station Pristina, Kosovo. GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs sources confirmed on July 7, 2005, the fact that the station chief of the Greek civil intelligence service, the Hellenic National Intelligence Service (NIS), had been assassinated by members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UCK: Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, in Albanian; OVK in Serbo-Croat) in Pristina, in the Serbian province of Kosovo, in May 2005. The sources identified the officer only by his initials, GK, aged 41. He has subsequently been replaced in the post by another officer.

GK, who had, in his youth, been a student in Pristina, spoke both Albanian and Serbo-Croat. It is usual for the NIS to post officers to places where they had lived or studied in their youth, because they would be familiar with the languages and customs of their host country. GK was approached as he was in the doorway of his home by some men who asked him, in Serbo-Croat, for the time. When he responded in Serbo-Croat, he was knifed.

Sources in the KLA -- which ostensibly no longer exists -- said that the fact that GK answered in Serbo-Croat showed that he was working with the Serbs of Kosovo, and therefore was assassinated as a message to Greece not to support the Serbs. The KLA was officially transformed into the "legal" Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) following the end of the NATO attacks of 1999 on Serbia.

Significantly, the Greek presence in Kosovo, among the international peacekeeping community, is the only one which is seen as offering protection to the ethnic Serbs in the province. However, the US Government has refused to allow Greek human rights groups to bring food, medical, or other relief supplies to the Serbian community in Kosovo, and the Greek Army is occasionally used to bring in such supplies for disadvantaged people in the province.

It was also significant that, in the allegedly-spontaneous pogrom which occurred in the province in March 2004, Greek forces were targeted by the KLA groups, and two Greek soldiers were killed because the Greek force did not respond when it came under KLA fire. It had not been given permission by the UN leadership in Kosovo to defend itself. As a result, the Greek forces in Kosovo have been given permission by Greek military authorities to return fire if attacked.

See Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, March 19, 2004: New Kosovo Violence is Start of Predicted 2004 Wave of Islamist Operations: the Strategic Ramifications .

The deaths of the two Greek soldiers in Kosovo had not earlier been revealed; neither had the assassination of the NIS station chief been announced.

Significantly, at about the time the KLA murdered GK, the group's leader, Agim Ceku -- the Commander of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), which was, in fact, created out of the narco-terrorism organization, the KLA -- was in the US on a visit supported and essentially sponsored by the US State Department, despite the fact that Ceku was a known war criminal and narco-trafficking leader who had spent time in a Scandinavian prison for narcotics trafficking.