The Saranda Operation Shows Albania’s Police Reform Working in Real Time

A citizen complaint about an illegal beach bar produced the kind of institutional result that Brussels has spent years asking Albania to deliver. The chain that ran from the complaint to the arrest of a station chief deserves examination.

by Aurel Cara (Tirana)

Albania’s Police Oversight Agency this week detained the chief of the Saranda police station and three of his subordinates for shielding an illegal beach bar going up on coastline they were paid to police. The arrests themselves are routine. The chain that produced them is not.

The charges read, on paper, as the familiar inventory of Albanian police failure: abuse of office, the commission of arbitrary acts, and failure to take measures to interrupt an illegal situation, all allegedly committed in collaboration. Articles 248, 250, and 251 of the Criminal Code have been available to prosecutors for a generation. The novelty lies in how the case reached them.

A citizen complaint about a build going up in the first administrative district of Saranda reached the State Police. The Director General, Skënder Hita, did not absorb it internally. He referred the matter to the Police Oversight Agency, known by its Albanian acronym AMP, and coordinated in parallel with the Saranda Prosecutor’s Office. Within days, the station that had reportedly protected the build was being dismantled by the body that oversees it. Commissioner Gëzim Bashllari, the station chief, is in custody along with two deputy commissioners, Andi Duro and Ajdin Ismailaj, and a zone inspector, Robert Çullaj. Commissioner Blerim Tafçiu, who heads the station’s Volume Crimes Section, was suspended after he failed to appear for questioning.

This is the institutional architecture that Albania’s rule of law reform was designed to produce. It is also the architecture that, for years, sceptical observers in Brussels and Washington argued existed only on paper.

The facts of the build itself are unsparing. The land where construction was taking place, where eight workers were arrested and machinery seized, had belonged to Isuf Jaçaj. Jaçaj was killed in October 2025 when an explosive device detonated in his car. Investigators now treat the property as having been seized, in effect, by a criminal group based in Kamëz, a Tirana suburb whose name has surfaced with increasing regularity in violent episodes across Saranda over the past year. The current owner of record, Arjola Dhrami Bajo, has been declared a fugitive. The build itself was a beach bar racing to open before the summer season on a stretch of coastline that has become, over the past five years, the single most contested commercial real estate in the country.

What protected the build, according to the oversight agency, was not a single corrupted officer. The agency describes a scheme designed to produce illicit profit, deflect legal responsibility, and shield subjects linked to criminal structures operating in the territory of Saranda. The station, on this account, was functioning as a service desk for a criminal economy.

Three institutional facts distinguish this operation from the long catalogue of cases announced and then quietly absorbed.

The State Police did not protect its own. Hita’s decision to refer the matter to the oversight agency rather than manage it inside the chain of command is the entire reason the operation happened. Police forces under pressure default to internal handling. The credibility of an oversight body depends on the leadership being policed being willing to invite it in, and in this case that willingness was demonstrated visibly, in writing, and at the level of the station chief.

The political leadership reinforced rather than complicated the action. Interior Minister Besfort Lamallari issued a statement the same morning that did not hedge, did not introduce a parallel narrative, and did not signal protection of the accused officers. He congratulated the oversight agency, committed to zero tolerance in subsequent cases, and stated plainly that the State Police has no room for officers who become partners of lawbreakers. Police reform functions only when the political principal accepts the embarrassment of his own subordinates facing prosecution. Lamallari accepted it.

The prosecution was inside the perimeter from the start. The Saranda Prosecutor’s Office was coordinated with the oversight agency rather than informed after the fact. For an investigation that will require careful documentation of bribery, illicit profit, and the chain that links four officers to a criminal group through a murdered man’s property, prosecutorial integration at the operational stage matters far more than any later courtroom drama.

A sceptical reading is available and worth stating. One successful operation does not refute the long history of Albanian police complicity in coastal illegality, particularly in Saranda and Ksamil, where the value of unbuilt coastline has produced predictable distortions for two decades. The oversight agency was created precisely because the pattern was systemic. This week’s detentions do not prove the pattern has been broken. They prove only that the mechanism designed to break it can produce a visible result when leadership chooses to use it.

That is, however, a meaningful demonstration. Albania’s accession process, and specifically the chapter work on rule of law, has carried a quiet question from member state capitals for several years: do the institutions Albania has built actually function, or are they decorative? The Saranda file offers an answer that, for once, does not require interpretive generosity. A citizen complaint moved through the system. The Director General activated the oversight body rather than the cover up reflex. The oversight body coordinated with prosecutors. The minister stood publicly behind the outcome. The accused officers face Criminal Code articles that, on conviction, carry real sentences.

The deeper significance lies in what the operation reveals about the criminal economy itself. The chain of custody traced by the oversight agency, from Isuf Jaçaj’s executed body to a Kamëz group to a rushed beach bar opening, describes a method. Coastal land is acquired through violence, laundered through nominal owners, developed without permits, and protected by purchased local police. The method requires the local police layer to function. Removing that layer, even at one station, raises the cost of the method. Whether the cost has been raised permanently or only temporarily depends on what the oversight agency and the prosecution do next, in Saranda and beyond.

The institution worked. That sentence is rarely available in the region without qualification.