Last Despatches: A Death Foretold – Kosovo Editor Killed Amid Political Unrest

Two bullets were fired at Enver Maloku's apartment in Pristina on July 18, 1998. One hit the railings of the balcony; the other hasn't been found. The assassination attempt failed.

When or not it was the same shooter who opened fire on the afternoon of January 11, 1999, this time the attempt succeeded.

Maloku, a journalist, writer and head of the Kosovo Information Centre, was hit by a bullet a few metres from the apartment on the ground floor of a building in the Sunny Hill neighbourhood where he lived. He died shortly afterwards at a hospital in Pristina.

A Serbian police report said at the time that Maloku was killed by a semi-automatic weapon and that there were three suspects at the crime scene.

But more than two decades later, it's still not known who was responsible, and Maloku is among the few Kosovo Albanian journalists killed during the war whose murder continues to be a mystery.

His death came against the backdrop of internecine political violence in Kosovo which developed at the same time as the growing resistance to Slobodan Milosevic's repressive regime, and questions remain as to whether his shooting was connected to the political in-fighting among Kosovo Albanian factions.

"The life of Enver Maloku from July 1998 to January 1999 was a chronicle of a death foretold," one ex-colleague, Muhamet Hamiti, told BIRN.

Hamiti said that they had been informed that Maloku was on a list of political and public figures who were condemned to death - a list that was apparently signed by the Kosovo Liberation Army or someone on behalf of the KLA's headquarters.

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Last Despatches: about the series

BIRN's Last Despatches series documents some of the 140 reporters and...