Albania’s foreign ministry on Saturday announced that it was banning the entry into the country of Cyprus MEP Eleni Theocharous, days after she attended the funeral of an ethnic Greek man killed in a shootout with police in southern Albania late last month.
The shooting death of Konstantinos Katsifas in the village of Bularat/Vouliarates during a confrontation between him and Albanian swat team members caused a diplomatic flare-up between Athens and Tirana in the subsequent days, as well as extensive media coverage in both countries.
The foreign ministry in Tirana has already declared 52 Greek citizens that attended the funeral or tried to attend, and were blocked by Albanian authorities, as personae non gratae last week.
Katsifas’ body was kept by authorities for 11 days after the shooting, and only released in Tirana, the country’s capital, after a series of bureaucratic delays.
The circumstances surrounding the incident remain murky, namely, whether the 35-year-old Greek-Albanian dual citizen was firing at police with an assault rifle he possessed, the reason for the standoff and whether he could have been taken alive, as local residents and his supporters in Greece maintain.
Conversely, the government in Tirana and even Albanian PM Edi Rama portrayed Katsifas as, among others, a pro-Greece-nationalist and even mentally unstable.
In a statement on Saturday, the Albanian ministry said that “…This decision (ban) stems from the legal and constitutional obligation of the institutions of the Republic of Albania to respond to the repeated extremist demonstrations of the MEP Eleni Theocharous. Her public declarations, which incite hatred, encroach the constitutional order of our country and her territorial claims towards the Republic of Albania could not and will not take place anymore in the Albanian territory.”
