An Albanian double murderer has been at large in Britain for up to 24 years, falsely posing as a refugee from Kosovo.
49-year-old Artan Muca gunned down two men with a Kalashnikov rifle in a billiards shop in his native country in 1997 but managed to escape justice by fleeing to the United Kingdom and lodging a bogus asylum claim in which he posed a Kosovan refugee, according to a Telegraph report.
Tried and sentenced to 25 years behind bars in absentia by an Albanian court, Muca was working in Britain as the director of a transport firm and had barely a year left to go before he would have been protected from punishment under the statute of limitations laws in Albania when he was arrested at his London home by British police officers.
A magistrate has now remanded him into custody pending extradition to Albania — although it is not a sure thing that the British state will successfully effect his removal from the country.
“We have been trying for a long time time to bring to justice this man who killed in cold-blood two innocent people,” said the head of the prosecutor’s office in Elbasan, Albania, Kreshnik Ajazi, in comments reported by the Telegraph.
“It was close cooperation with UK partners that brought the result. We shared with them all the intelligence information we managed to get from our end including fingerprints data,” he said.
“We do not know how he successfully managed to hide in the UK for 24 years but we never gave up our efforts to bring him back to serve 25 years of a prison sentence.”
Such things are not uncommon in the United Kingdom, however, which boasts a remarkably poor and rapidly worsening record when it comes to foreign criminals.
Deportations of foreign national offenders, as they are called, collapsed by 79 per cent in 2020 under Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his supposedly tough Home Secretary, Priti Patel.
Artan Muca is by no means the only criminal migrant to use the United Kingdom as a bolt hole, either, with it being revealed by a former Secretary of State that at least five suspected Rwandan genocide perpetrators have been living in the country openly for some time, with four being subsidised by British taxpayers through state welfare benefits.
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