Following his attack on the Italian public broadcaster RAI3, Prime Minister Edi Rama has claimed that the Italian government has refuted their TV report on a 1,200 percent increase in cannabis cultivation in Albania during the last year. Rama again slammed the RAI3 report, calling it “scandalous” and “huge lie”, and attached screenshots of an article on an Italian website to prove his point.
“Here is the official truth regarding the scandalous RAI3 report! Thank you to Italian police authorities for helping us every day in our common victory against cannabis cultivation, as well as for helping us in this particular case to win against a huge lie by a media,” Rama tweeted on Friday.
He attached screenshots of a short article published on an Italian news agency called Adnkronos, which for most of its part focuses on refuting the RAI3 report. It says that in an event related to bilateral cooperation between Italy and Albania, attended by Italian and Albanian deputy ministers of interior – Vito Crimi and Julian Hodaj – “full clarity was made regarding the TG 3 report on 27 January, which speaks of a confidential police report on the exponential increase of cannabis plants in the Albanian territory.”
The article further states, without clarifying who exactly said what, that “authorities specifically pointed out that the news in the report do not correspond to accurate data and cannot cast shadows neither on the real effectiveness of the fight against cannabis cultivation, nor on the important results achieved over the past few years.”
The article also failed to quote any figures on cannabis cultivation or seizure by police in Albania during the last year.
In their report, RAI3 journalists referred to a recent, still unpublished Italian Police report they were provided to read, which showed aerial photos of cannabis plantations in Albania. It estimated that 100,000 cannabis plants are growing in Albania now.
Italian Prosecutor Giacomo Cataldi of the Lecce Prosecution Office told RAI3 that Albania has become one of the major cannabis producers. As a result, the Albanian mafia has accumulated large amounts of money, which have enabled them to take a leading role in drug trafficking and other criminal activities in Europe.
The report called “Europe’s border” was prepared by journalist Valerio Cataldi, who was threatened a few years ago for reporting on former Minister of Interior Saimir Tahiri’s involvement in drug trafficking, at a time when cannabis cultivation in Albania reached new records.
In 2019, the U.S. State Department published a damning report on drug cultivation and drug trafficking in Albania. Several reports from the previous year also painted a similar situation.
Besides his usual attacks on all critical Albanian media, which he calls “trashbins”, Prime Minister Edi Rama has attacked several international media before, including The Voice of America and The Bild over the Albanian Electiongate. The latter relates prosecution wiretaps showing Rama and several high Socialist Party officials engage in conversations, allegedly focused on rigging of two elections in Albania, in collusion with criminal groups mostly engaged in drug trafficking.
