Radovan Karadzic, Sarajevo is not your city, and you have no right to say that it is, just as you do not have the right to say in public, even if it’s in court, that someone has dug up bones around Bosnia and brought them to Srebrenica to make a fake graveyard. This is insulting.
Prosecutors to Appeal Albania Sentence
Tirana | 11 November 2009 |
The collapse of the apartment bloc last November left three dead, including a young girl and four others injured.
According to the indictment, construction work on a new building at the base of the hill on 9 November, 2008 - where the apartment block is located - caused the collapse.
The owner of the construction company, Sotiraq Janora, was charged with murder, while six other people, among them local officials, were charged with abuse of power.
The district court gave Janora a six year prison sentence compared to the 21-year sentence asked for by prosecutors. Five of the indictees received prison sentences ranging from two to two years and six months in prison, while two others were found innocent.
Prosecutors lamented that although the collapse of the building had three victims, Janora had gone down on one manslaughter charge.
Real estate has been booming in Albania for a decade. Price increases have been fueled by strong domestic demand, availability of mortgage loans, fast-flowing remittances from family members working abroad and a strong migratory trend from rural to urban areas.
Nowhere domestically has the economic buoyancy over the past ten years yielded greater change than in the property market, with the construction industry accounting for over 10 per cent of overall economic activity in 2008.
However, the fast pace of growth, coupled with weak state institutions and corruption, has reduced oversight on constriction sites.
The local office of the watchdog group Transparency International stated after the collapse that the incident was the result of lack of regulations and weak enforcement of existing rules in the construction industry because of corruption.
The local media reported that the inhabitants of the collapsed building had continually complained about the construction and had even filed a law suit against the developers of the new building.
