Death In The Afternoon

The controlled, ritualistic administration of death in an Albanian army depot on March 15, provides a laboratory setting for a perspective on how corruption kills.

The village of Gerdec, only ten minutes outside the Albanian capital Tirana, would have never made a headline, even in toilet graffiti.

Hidden behind a highway underpass, on the road that links Tirana with the resort town of Durres, Gerdec is a rucksack of weirdly spread houses over a dirt road, splintered from the world by a line of rusty rail tracks.

However, a deadly explosion on March 15, which was heard according to reports even in neighboring Macedonia and Kosovo, has taken it on a wrong turn in history and brought it under the lens of hundreds of local and international media reports.

A few minutes after noon, a series of blasts that ripped through a makeshift structure constructed on an old army depot to deactivate old artillery shells, ripped apart the area killing 26 people, injuring more than 300 and damaging more than 3000 homes and businesses.

The house of the Deliu family at the base of the crater