A shooting took place on Tuesday in broad daylight in Tirana. The incident ocurred in the underpass near the Dry Lake near the Grand Lake Park, highlighting Albania’s ongoing struggle with gun crime.
No one was injured in the shooting but the victim was reported to be the school administrator at Woodrow Wilson School which is situated within the grounds of the park. The assailant has not yet been identified and the victim says he was not targeted, but rather in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He told Balkan Web, “No no, the attack had nothing to do with me. There were a couple of boys fighting, I was passing as I was going to work when I heard guns ‘bam bam’. I saw two bullets hit my car…I saw the young people were running away.”
2021 saw a significant increase in murders in Albania, with a rise of 13% over the course of the year. Some 30% of all murders committed were attributed to Mafia-life killings involving links to criminal activity, according to the State Police.
“We continue to remain a country where much of what happens is because of weak motives and ongoing quarrel. A certain category is murders with organised crime in the background,” said Tonin Vocaj, Director for the Department for Criminal Police.
“The fight against serious crimes, detection, documentation and bringing to justice the perpetrators who commit criminal murders in Albania will remain an important challenge for the police for 2022,” she added.
Over 56 people were killed between January and December, more than in previous years. Furthermore, over 120 murder cases remain unsolved since 2014.
In 2020, there were 372 reported instances of firearm crimes in Albania, the majority of which were committed by men. There were seven accidental shootings (celebratory/hunting), 84 with a criminal context, ten disputes with police, 58 public disputes, 88 weapon seizures, and 50 other incidents.
This means Albania’s gun death rate is 1.46 per 100,000. Globally, this puts it somewhere in the middle. Greece, Denmark, and Portugal have similar rates, while countries like Honduras (60 per 100,000), Venezuela (49), and El Salvador (42) take the top spots. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan are bottom of the list with almost 0.
Albanian men aged 19-35 were the most likely out of all surveyed countries to commit a firearms crime.
There are approximately 210,000 illegal weapons in Albania; that’s one weapon for every 13 citizens.
In 1997, citizens took some 839 million ammunition units from army depots and 16 million explosives, and over half a million firearms. To date, only around 40% have been returned.
In 2019, many weapons and ammunition units were stolen from a military base near Vlora. According to the report, many automatic combat weapons, grenades, cartridges, combat rifles, and various other paraphernalia were lifted from the base, with many believing it was an inside job.
Albania has been the centre of a Balkan-wide weapons trafficking network with firearms entering the country from Macedonia, Kosovo, and Montenegro.
Earlier this year, the government announced plans to change the law on gun ownership, reducing the minimum age of gun licenses from 25 years to 22 years old.
The rate of gun deaths in Albania in 2016 (when data was last available) is 1.37% of all violent fatalities, higher than the US rate. More than 12,000 people have died from gun crime in Albania since 1991.
This shows that the number of gun-related deaths has increased over the last four years.
While the government has organized several amnesties, they haven’t yielded a significant response.
Gun Deaths and Crime on the Rise in Albania, Men Aged 19-35 Most Likely to Offend
