Kosovo town mayor gets three years for extortion

Apr 21, 2011, 17:41 GMT

Pristina/Belgrade - A Pristina court Thursday sentenced the mayor of a Kosovo town to three years in prison for extortion, the European Union's law-enforcing mission (EULEX) said.

A panel of two EULEX and one local judge handed Xhabir Zharku, the mayor of Kacanik, the sentence for extortion, and a 1,500-euro (2,150 dollars) fine for the illegal possession of weapons.

Three of his co-defendants were also sentenced to prison sentences ranging between 14 months and three years. They were found guilty of threatening to kill the winners of a tender for a sheep farm in 2008.

Zharku harassed the buyers of the farm until they relented, withdrew their bid and turned it over to the second-best bidder, one of the mayor's friends, who were also sent to jail.

Kacanik is an ethnically-mixed town near Kosovo's border with Macedonia, 50 kilometres south of Pristina.

The EU deployed EULEX to the mostly Albanian Kosovo after it declared independence from Serbia in 2008, to help the crime- and corruption-plagued new state establish the rule of law.

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