The handful of hardened Albanian criminals deported from the UK under a much-vaunted Government scheme to serve prison sentences in their native country can be exposed today.
Some 200 of the most serious offenders – including murderers, sex predators and gangsters – were meant to be returned to jails in the Balkan nation under the £4.3million programme introduced two years ago.
But just eight have been sent packing so far, as the Mail revealed last week – with six pictured here for the first time – leaving at least 1,200 Albanian criminals in UK prisons.
Today we can disclose the identities of the ‘Albanian Eight’, which includes a rapist who attacked a 15-year-old at a shopping centre, a violent thug who committed grievous bodily harm in his teenage years and drug kingpins operating across the UK.
The transfer agreement, signed off by the previous Tory Government and continued by Labour, has been bedevilled by court backlogs in Albania, which insists on approving the sentence given to each criminal in the UK before permitting the handover.
The Government paid Albania £4.3million to modernise its prisons in exchange for accepting the deportees – meaning each of the criminals returned has cost British taxpayers £537,500.
A fleet of 15 new prison service electric cars and 22 minibuses was also bought as part of the deal.
The scheme came into force in May 2023, authorising the removal of all Albanian offenders serving more than four years. Nearly two years on, however, many of the country’s worst criminals are still languishing in overcrowded British prisons.
One still in the UK is Koci Selamaj, who was sentenced to a minimum of 36 years in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital for murdering schoolteacher Sabina Nessa, 28, with a metal traffic triangle before strangling her in a London park in 2021. Selamaj has since been handed a further four and a half years for stabbing a prison officer with a piece of broken toilet in his cell.
One of the eight Albanian criminals returned is Klodjan Copja, 30, a kingpin of a cocaine supply network smuggling £60million-worth of drugs into the UK.
Another is Erald Mema, 40, a drugs gang chief who was sentenced to 25 years after £560,000 in cash was found following his distribution of cocaine across the Midlands and Oxford.
Gentjan Dervishaj, 33, was jailed for bringing £11million of narcotics into the North East in one of the region’s largest ever drugs rackets.
Elion Gllava, 29, has also been deported – a drug runner found guilty of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent and conspiracy to possess a firearm to endanger life during a car-ramming incident in Oldham, Greater Manchester, in 2021. One person was shot in the mayhem.
Also involved in the same incident and sent home was Andon Bita, 49. He was handed a 17-year sentence for grievous bodily harm with intent, possessing a firearm to endanger life and supplying illegal drugs.
The sixth man now back in Albania is Dardan Dollapaj, 25. He was charged with attempted murder after a stabbing on Hounslow High Street, west London, in 2019.
Rufat Kasamaj, of Leyton, east London, a 38-year-old sex predator, was sent back after being sentenced to ten and a half years for raping a 15-year-old girl at a bar in the capital’s Westfield shopping centre.
The eighth and final criminal so far deported is Dolimar Sejdiu, 24. He was found guilty of grievous bodily harm and wounding in west London five years ago.
All are now in Albanian prisons, which permit a wife or girlfriend to stay over one night each week – a privilege not allowed in British institutions.
Authorities in the capital Tirana claim another 59 criminals are still in the UK waiting for a decision to be made by the Albanian courts.
The Mail has been told they include at least one murderer, two rapists and drug trafficking and firearm offenders.
A source for the Albanian justice system said: ‘The process… takes time due to a backlog here.’