By Prof. Dr. Bardhyl Çipi
Part Six
Prof. Çipi: “I recount the cases when I was called to perform forensic examinations on persons killed at the border, attempting to escape from Albania!”
SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF STRIKING DEATHS
(Public figures, victims of the dictatorship, other events)
Memorie.al / Bardhyl Çipi, one of the most experienced specialists in our country in the field of Forensic Medicine and Bioethics, their teaching, and the training of new forensic experts. Some of his patients include: victims killed at the border while attempting to escape the communist dictatorship, one whose hidden corpse was discovered with the help of his faithful dog, the interned woman who committed suicide out of despair, citizens of Kosovo killed by the Serbs because they sought to live freely, to avoid being humiliated and tortured by them, inhabitants who lived in Albania 1500 years ago, a University of Tirana professor who was robbed and murdered, etc. A book about death and scientific evidence for discovering its different types: murder, suicide, those stimulated and forced by the communist regime, murders and genocides against Albanians by their neighbors, fresh or decomposed and skeletonized corpses. Documents on the deaths of prominent figures; Kennedy, Lincoln, Napoleon, Lenin, Trotsky, etc., and other events involving the deaths of ordinary people. Knowledge about the changes that occur after death and the examination of corpses worldwide and in our country, from a historical, ethical, forensic, and legal perspective. Some of his latest books are: “Manuali i Mjekësisë Ligjore” (Forensic Medicine Manual) (2015), “Bioethics in Albania nowadays” (2016), “Tranzicioni shqiptar në lupën e mjekësisë ligjore” (The Albanian Transition under the Forensic Medicine Lens) (2018), “Mjekësia Ligjore Kriminalistika” (Forensic Medicine Criminology) (2020).
Continued from the previous issue
Crimes: Murders, Suicides, and Others against Persons Persecuted by the Communist Regime
In our country, active participation from all forensic services was involved in the post-1990 searches and subsequent examinations of the corpses of political dissidents buried in unknown locations; I was the main leader of these efforts. However, in these searches, which were mostly initiated by the victims’ families, many obstacles were encountered:
-The former regime, to make the discovery of the corpses of dissidents and political opponents as impossible as possible, carried out secret exhumations and reburials after their first burial, often repeated two or three times, such as with the corpse of Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu, or the corpses of high-ranking army leaders: Generals Beqir Balluku (Minister of Defense), Petrit Dume, and Hito Çako.
For this reason, despite great efforts, the bodies of these victims could not be found in many cases.
For example, the searches for the skeletal remains of Bahri Omari and several other persons declared enemies and sentenced to death were unsuccessful. At that time, extensive excavations were conducted in an area near the Bektashi World Headquarters in Tirana, where they were thought to be buried. Only a few scattered animal bones were discovered there.
In another instance, the prosecution sent human bone fragments, discovered in the Përmet district, to the Central University Forensic Medicine Service in Tirana, which were thought to belong to a young man from Shkodra, a graduate of a Theology university in Italy and executed by the communists. The detailed forensic and anthropological examination I performed showed that they belonged to an elderly person, over 50–60 years old, ruling out the possibility that they belonged to the young man.
Another event I remember was the hopeless attempts to find the remains of a victim executed many years prior. In the post-1990s, one morning around 1993, a large man came to see me in the office. He told me he was an American citizen, who had lived in New York for many years, following his escape from a village in Northern Albania. He had come to find his uncle’s grave and begged me to help him identify the bone fragments. He told me that his uncle, long ago in the 1950s, was performing his military service in an Army unit in the area of the “Students’ City” in Tirana, where the “Ali Rizai Barracks” used to be. Extremely dissatisfied with the communist regime, he attempted to escape, but was caught and sentenced to death. His execution was carried out in front of the entire battalion, to serve as an example and to frighten all the other soldiers. Afterward, he was buried in a large and deep pit dug near the place where he was shot. His close friend, also a soldier in that unit, now elderly, remembered the burial site well.
A few days later, on a clear morning, together with the nephew and the uncle’s friend, we went to the place where the victim was buried, to assist in the excavations for the discovery of the corpse, so that I could then perform the examination. The area was dug thoroughly, inch by inch and deep, all day long, but nothing was found, with the exception of a few scattered animal bones. The entire clan, more than 20 people, who had come from the victim’s village to honor him and then organize the burial ceremony, also assisted in these excavations. I felt very sorry for their despair at not finding the body of their relative.
-Another flaw in these examinations was the lack of accurate and complete comparative data. As is known, forensic anthropology of unknown skeletons is inherently a comparison, where the data from the examination of the human remains is compared with that of the person these remains are thought to belong to. If this comparative data is missing, identification will be impossible.
I recall a case when, in the early years after 1990, the Association of Former Political Persecutees and Prisoners brought five skulls to the Forensic Medicine Service, which were believed to belong to political victims from the Berat district. I performed a detailed anthropological examination of them, determining sex, age, race, and unique individual characteristics. The organization of former Persecutes and Political Prisoners did not provide us with any comparative information, despite our insistence. In these conditions, their identity could not be determined.
The difficulty in obtaining comparative data may also have stemmed from the distant time that had passed since these deaths, when the relatives of these victims may also be very old or have died. This may have happened with the 13 human remains found in a mass grave, near Mount Dajt. Their examination was performed by me and other forensic colleagues. In the absence of comparative data, they still remain unidentified.
The more time passes, the more difficult it becomes to find the comparative data necessary for the identification of skeletal remains, despite the fact that the very accurate DNA method is now in use. Despite these difficulties, the Central Forensic Medicine Service, which I directed, managed to successfully complete much identification in these cases.
Thus, the identification of corpses was carried out, which, after being sentenced to death by firing squad, instead of being buried in unknown locations, were sent to the Normal Anatomy department of the Faculty of Medicine in Tirana, to be used by students to better understand the structure of the human body.
As far as I can recall, the Forensic Medicine Service performed the forensic and criminalistics examinations of more than ten corpses located there. They belonged to executed persons, with bullet holes in the head of each corpse. Following the completion of the identification process, where the dactyloscopy examination of fingerprints provided great help, it was confirmed that they belonged to persons sentenced to death who had committed ordinary crimes, mainly murder.
Also at that time, I examined another corpse in the Normal Anatomy department of the Faculty of Medicine, which belonged to a political prisoner. Affected by a serious illness, during his imprisonment in the 1970s, he had been sent to the resuscitation ward of the surgical hospital in Tirana. Despite the medical aid, he had died, and his corpse was not given to the family but was secretly sent to the normal anatomy department. After my examination of the identifying features of the corpse, compared with those obtained from the family members, a correct identification was achieved. Following this, the corpse was given to the family for the burial ceremony.
The most notable case was that of the 22 innocent victims, executed without trial in 1951, under the pretext that they had participated in placing a bomb in the Soviet embassy in Tirana.
In 1992, numerous bone fragments were discovered in a large pit near the village of Menik in Tirana, not far from the Erzen River. An elderly resident indicated that in January 1951, he had heard many human voices and weeping in that spot. Immediately, the suspicion arose that they might belong to the 22 victims of this tragic event that had occurred at that time. Therefore, with the direct interest of the family members, excavations began for the discovery and retrieval of all these bone fragments.
For this, a colleague and friend of mine, a doctor specializing in the field of anthropology, was called by them to help in the careful finding and retrieval of the remains, with the hope that he would succeed in identifying the remains of each of the 22 victims. When he was unable to achieve this and separate the remains for each victim, I was also called to see the pit of bones. Afterwards, all these skeletal remains were brought to the Central Forensic Medicine Service, where we arranged them according to the types of bones on the benches of a hall on the third floor of this service. There, we began their detailed forensic and anthropological examination.
On this occasion, I want to recall that in this very hall, many years earlier, I had placed many series of bones, hundreds of skeletons from the Anatomy department, taken from a church in the village of Kreshovë in the Përmet district. I studied them in detail for several months, to determine dozens of descriptive and measurement anthropological features, the results of which I successfully presented in the defense of my dissertation in 1981.
Also during that period, I examined in detail there, over a two-month period, the remains of 23 martyrs from the Berat district. Their names were known, but it had not been determined which bone parts belonged to each of them. For this, along with the forensic doctor of the Berat district, we retrieved these remains from each grave. I brought them to Tirana, where I placed them in this same hall. There, along with other forensic colleagues, we examined them in great detail for about two months; the method of photographic superimposition was also applied to some of them. In conclusion, their accurate identification was carried out, and a ceremonial reburial took place in the Martyrs’ Cemetery of the Berat district.
Later, in this same hall, I examined many other similar cases, but which had no connection with the political persecutions of the communist regime. But let me return again to the examination of the 22 victims, executed without trial by the communist regime.
The skeletal parts consisted of:
-15 broken and fragmented skulls, with a portion of the teeth and molars generally preserved; in one skull, both jaws are preserved;
-about 30 isolated teeth and molars;
-about 300 vertebrae, a portion of which are broken and destroyed, including 9 atlases and 9 axes;
-about 285 ribs and rib fragments, generally eroded and destroyed;
-3 sacrum’s, generally complete and preserved;
-about 15 eroded and destroyed fragments of pelvic bones;
-several fragments of scapulae and their parts;
-14 clavicles, generally preserved;
-18 humeri; in one case, the right humerus was found connected to the left one with a strong electric cord;
-44 ulnae and radii, generally preserved, but among them some eroded and fragmented ones; in one case, the two right forearm bones were tied to the two left ones, quite similarly, with a strong electric cord;
-30 femurs or fragmented and eroded parts of them;
-22 tibiae in the same condition;
-20 complete patellae;
-25 tali and 15 calcanei of both sides, but a complete pairing of them are not achieved;
-830 small bones of the hands and feet (carpals, metacarpals, tarsals, metatarsals, and phalanges);
-about 500 fragments of crushed bones./Memorie.al
To be continued in the next issue
