The Krasniqi clan. Nice family. Role models. Links with US Kosovo and Albanian governments

[Magda Hassan]

Several websites, including DebbieSchlussel.com, JawaReport and PipelineNews, have picked up on a connection that investigator Bill Warner made last month between the aunt of Salt Lake jihadist Sulejman Talovic — Ajka Omerovic — and an Amir Omerovic, a naturalized citizen from Bosnia, who a few years ago was convicted of sending what he threatened were anthrax-laced letters to then Connecticut Governor John C. Rowland, as well as to the U.S. Coast Guard and Marines in CT. Part of the letter, according to the NY Times, read: “This is only the beginning. Americans will die. Death to America and Israel.”
The assumption is that Omerovic is some kind of cousin of Talovic and that therefore the Talovic-Omerovic family is no stranger to jihadist activities. As of yet, it is unclear what, if any, relationship exists between Omerovic and Talovic, but there isn’t any need to look for blood relations across the country when there are plenty of jihadist activities happening much closer to home. Talovic and Omerovic need never have met for each to have independently taken up jihad.
Rather than look for distant relations, we can be reasonably sure that there’s a common denominator inside both Talovic and Omerovic — that universal Muslim sense of aggrievement and the thirst to kill which Islam satisfies.
What explains the common last name is the fact that the primitives of Bosnia arrange themselves in the same way that the primitives of Kosovo do: by clan. And not all in the clan know one another. To illustrate the loose way in which this works, let us look at the Krasniqi clan of Kosovo/Albania (the ‘q’ is pronounced ‘ch’). The most famous Krasniqi is Florin Krasniqi, a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who resides in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and who until recently was smuggling planeloads of weapons from the U.S. to Kosovo, to arm the Albanians for war against Serbia, NATO and the UN in the event that the Albanian land grab from Serbia isn’t made official by the middle of this year. Krasniqi raised $30 million from the Albanian-American community for the KLA to wage domestic terror in Yugoslavia. He was the subject of a Dutch documentary that aired on PBS in 2005, in which he admitted to having worked with bin Laden’s people.

Richard C. Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on the left, joking around with weapons smuggler Florin Krasniqi and Wesley Clark at a John Kerry fundraiser. (Source: Serbianna, where the video can be accessed from the front page.)
Demonstrating just how loose the clan connection can be is the fact that Florin Krasniqi continues his KLA activities despite the murder by the KLA of an Ahmet Krasniqi (specifically, by America’s man in Kosovo — Hashim “the Snake” Thaci). From a New York Times article by Christopher Hedges:

As tensions rose, Thaci and the Albanian authorities decided to eliminate Krasniqi, according to former rebel commanders and two former Albanian officials interviewed in Tirana…On Sept. 21 at 11 P.M. on the way back from a restaurant in Tirana, Krasniqi ran into a police checkpoint about 300 yards from his office on Dibra Street, according to a former rebel commander who was with Krasniqi…
When Krasniqi and his two companions got out of their gray Opal jeep they saw three men emerge from the shadows with black hoods over their faces. The men, speaking with an Albanian accent that distinguished them from Kosovo Albanians, ordered the two men with Krasniqi to get down on the ground.
“Which one is it?” asked one of the gunmen, according to one of the commanders who was prone on the asphalt.
“The one in the middle,” said another. The gunmen, who held a pistol a few inches from Krasniqi’s head, fired a shot. He then fired two more shots into Krasniqi’s head once he fell onto the pavement…As NATO bombs fell on Kosovo this April, two more outspoken commanders, Agim Ramadani, a captain in the former Yugoslav Army, and Sali Ceku, were killed, each in an alleged Serbian ambush.

Note the last name Ceku. The assassination of Sali Ceku by the KLA didn’t keep one Agim Ceku from becoming the current, KLA-affiliated prime minister of Kosovo. To the contrary, last August Ceku praised a war criminal named Selim Krasniqi:

The Humanitarian Law Center has issued a press statement condemning Agim Ceku’s behavior in the case of Selim Krasniqi…
“Bearing in mind the fact that, on 10 August 2006, the International Trial Chamber pronounced Selim Krasniqi, Bedri Zymberi and Agron Krasniqi guilty of war crime, illegal detention and kidnapping of Albanians in the village of Drenovac (municipality of Mališevo), the Prime Minister’s visit to the convicted and temporarily released General and his statement that “Kosovo needs men like General Selim Krasniqi” sent a message to the public that certain citizens of Kosovo, such as General Selim Krasniqi, are above the law…”

(Yes, Selim Krasniqi and Agron Krasniqi probably are related.)
The Brooklyn arms smuggler Florin Krasniqi continues his KLA activities also despite the massacre of an entire Krasniqi family by the KLA. From a 2002 Der Spiegel article that’s worth reading in full (it’s not long):

A strange grave lies in the midst of a large meadow in the village of Crni Luk. There are no names on the four gravestones, and the inhabitants of [the] village of 3,000 react with distrust to questions about the dead. “This is where we buried the charred remains of the Krasniqi clan,” says a young Albanian man and adds immediately with a wave of his hand: “But I do not know more than that.”
Twenty-four Albanians were shot, among them 13 children, and their houses were burned down…The four Krasniqi brothers were considered “loyalists to the Serbian regime” and worked in Serbian companies; one of them was even [a] journalist for the Serbian language newspaper “Jedinstvo”. Under the Milosevic regime they enjoyed privileges; afterwards, this was their death sentence.

Those “privileges”, incidentally, are nothing more than the same opportunities that every other, non-secessionist citizen of the former Yugoslavia had regardless of ethnicity.
The next Krasniqi I heard about was this guy:

Detectives who investigated an Albanian couple and found they had committed a catalogue of abhorrent crimes against an 18-year-old woman have revealed the pair came to the UK in 1999 from Kosovo and one jumped the border on the back of a lorry.
Blendi Krasniqi arrived in Victoria, central London, seven years ago and was granted political asylum…D Sgt Eddington said the woman was forced to visit up to 40 clients a day or entertain them at the house let to the couple, in Oliver Road, Sutton. They were believed to have played equal parts in what the judge who sentenced them described as an “evil trade” and would drive the woman to the clients’ homes together, collecting payment in advance and wait to drive her back.
…
The woman became so desperate to escape her tormentors that she walked into a pub and stole a wallet and a mobile phone from a man in a bid to attract attention from the police. This led her to eventual safety and set court proceedings in motion against Krasniqi and Zeneli…

Then I noticed that I myself had mentioned yet another Krasniqi in a 2005 article:

While Byzantine art exhibits at New York museums were humming last year, 900-year-old Serb churches, cathedrals and monasteries in Kosovo were being systematically bombed, burned, looted, and urinated on in a single week. The pogroms had been set off by a rumor, later confirmed false by NATO, that Serbs had drowned some Albanian youths. By the end of March, 366 homes and 41 churches were destroyed, according to an AP report, which quoted 23 year-old Ruzhdi Krasniqi, who “smoked a cigarette as he assessed the damage and said he felt ‘OK’ about [it]. ‘I don’t want the Serbs to return here,’ he said. ‘They’ve got no place here.’”

There was also a Lullizim Krazniqi, a major drug dealer on the Balkan route, who was killed last March. Next, I stumbled upon a Jakup Krasniqi, a former spokesman for the KLA and Kosovo’s current minister of Environment and Spacial Planning. This is from a 1999 NY Times abstract:

Senior Kosovo Liberation Army official, Jakup Krasniqi, says that guerrilla force would not allow itself to be disarmed, though that is a central tenet of proposed peace deal announced by allied diplomats in Germany; says, however, that rebel soldiers ‘would never’ fight peacekeepers.

(So much for that, huh!)
There is also Arif Krasniqi, a member of the al Qaeda-affiliated terror group Abu Bakr Sadiq, which a Belgrade policy institute mentioned in 2004:

The Islamist terrorist group Abu Bakr Sadiq is active in South Mitrovica…[It] is named after the mujeheddin unit of the same time which carried out terrorist operations in Kosovo in 1998…The paramilitary activities of the Abu Bakr Sadiq unit, comprised of about 120 terrorists from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Albania and Iran did not last very long. Thanks to operations by Serbian police in autumn 1998 the Kosovo Liberation Army was almost completely destroyed, including the Abu Bakr Sadiq unit as one of its component parts…however, in 2001, under pressure from the U.S. resulting from the activities of the Albanian-American Civil League (see Wesley Clark’s love letter to this group), they were released along with other Kosovo Liberation Army members.
…
Abu Bakr Sadiq is presently comprised of some 30 terrorists, including Shpend Kopriva, Muhamed Avdija, Sami Hoti, Alija Hoti, Besim Ismaili, Sami Hoti, Ertan Bitiqi, Ahmet Hoxha, Lulazim Ymeri, Nexhmedin Laush, Arif Krasniqi…

Next, this headline last July from the Macedonian newspaper Vecer (”Evening”) caught my eye, via BBC Monitoring Europe: “Macedonia: Vratnica attack said done by Krasniqi group,” which was soon followed by this headline: Albanian Gunman’s Release Sparks Fury in Macedonia

Macedonia’s government held a special session on September 1 to discuss how an ethnic Albanian who turned a village outside Skopje (Macedonian capital) into a no-go zone for the police was allowed to walk free…Agim Krasniqi and a dozen other armed men have given the government a headache ever since last November, when they took over control of the village of Kondovo, a dozen kilometers from Skopje [capital], effectively turning it into a safe haven for criminals from Macedonia and Kosovo.
…
Police issued warrants for his arrest after he ignored a court summons for hearings over charges that included theft, kidnapping and illegal possession of weapons.
But Krasniqi remained defiant, warning that if the police approached the village he would retaliate against Skopje itself with bombs and explosives…It is not clear what happened to the heavy weaponry Krasniqi claimed to hold in the village…In the meantime, Krasniqi can be seen sitting in cafes in the centre of Skopje…

Of course, when it suits his purposes, Agim Krasniqi is capable of saving the day:

…outside the village of Kondovo in the Summer of 2005, armed men from the Wahhabi camp attacked a car carrying…imams who spoke out against the Wahhabis. In a strange twist, the moderate imams were saved when another armed group, that of Kondovo native and young militant Agim Krasniqi, attacked the Wahhabis.

A Krasniqi also came up in a New York Times article from 1982 by a Marvine Howe, albeit with the alternate “Krasnici” spelling. Note the picture of Kosovo that this article — like all the buried articles from the region throughout the 70s and 80s — paints:

There have been no serious troubles between Serbians and Albanians in Bec [near the Albanian border], but Serbs in some of the neighboring villages have reportedly been harassed by Albanians and have packed up and left the region.
The exodus of Serbs is admittedly one of the main problems that the authorities have to contend with in Kosovo, an autonomous province of Yugoslavia inhabited largely by Albanians.
…
In June a 43-year-old Serb, Miodrag Saric, was shot and killed by an Albanian neighbor, Ded Krasnici, in a village near Djakovica, 40 miles southwest of Pristina, according to the official Yugoslav press agency Tanyug. It was the second murder of a Serb by an Albanian in Kosovo this year. The dispute reportedly started with a quarrel over damage done to a field belonging to the Saric family…Five members of the Krasnici family have been arrested and investigations are continuing.

(This was back when murders of Serbs were prosecuted; under Serbia, Kosovo still had some semblance of rule of law.)

The authorities have responded at various levels to the violence in Kosovo, clearly trying to avoid antagonizing the Albanian majority. Besides firm security measures, action has been taken to speed political, educational and economic changes.
…
“The nationalists have a two-point platform,” according to Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, “first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.”
…
The migration of Serbs is no ordinary problem because Kosovo is the heartland of Serbian history, culture and religion. Serbs have been in this region since the seventh century…[Pressures] included personal insults, damage to Serbian graves and the burning of hay, cutting down wood and other attacks on property to force Serbs to leave.
…
What is special about Pristina is that it has always been Serbs on one side of the street and Albanians on the other. Residents say Albanins have been encroaching on Serbian ‘’territory'’ since the disturbances.
After the crackdown on Albanian nationalists — about 300 have been sentenced — they are said to have changed tactics, moving to the villages, where there is less security control. In some mixed communities, there were reports of farmers being pressured to sell their land cheap and of Albanian shopkeepers refusing to sell goods to Serbs.

This has been the short list of Krasniqis. At an event in which he was pitching Kosovo to potential investors, the KLA arms smuggler Florin Krasniqi tried to allay the investors’ fears about organized crime running the show in Kosovo. Krasniqi used a quip that I’ve heard used by Russian mafiosos about Russians: Albanians are too disorganized to have “organized crime”. Considering the mayhem they’ve managed “without” organization, imagine what they’ll be capable of when they do, by their standards, get organized. Actually, we won’t have to imagine; we’ll see it in June, in the conflict they’ve been arming for since we did their bidding in ‘99: unilaterally declaring independence, and war, on NATO and the UN.

http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/?p=741