Albanian double murderer faces extradition 24 years after arriving as a bogus refugee

Charles Hymas
·2 min read
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An Albanian double murderer is facing extradition from the UK after being identified more than 20 years since allegedly coming to Britain as a bogus asylum seeker and securing British citizenship.

Artan Muca, 49, has allegedly been in hiding or on the run for 24 years after claiming asylum in the UK by allegedly using a bogus identity as a Kosovan war refugee.

Mr Muca was sentenced to 25 years in jail in Albania in absentia for shooting dead two men with a Kalashnikov in a dispute at a billiards shop.

He is believed to have been working as a director of a transport company under the assumed identity before being arrested at his home in north London by Scotland Yard’s extradition unit in February.

He appeared before central London magistrates and was remanded in custody on Wednesday following the extradition request by the Albanian Government for the double murder in 1997.

It is not known how he stayed ahead of the police and investigators or whether he spent all his time in the UK after fleeing Albania following the murders.

However, police sources said new information was presented to Scotland Yard just a year before Albania’s statute of limitations took effect in 2022, meaning the authorities could no longer punish him for a crime committed over a quarter of a century ago.

Albanian sources suggested a cold case review of the murders led Albanian police to wiretap his relative's phones and intercept phone calls from the UK with the information then passed to UK police.

Kreshnik Ajazi, head of the prosecutor’s office in Elbasan, central Albania, where the murders were committed, said: “We have been trying for a long time time to bring to justice this man who killed in cold-blood two innocent people.

“It was close cooperation with UK partners that brought the result. We shared with them all the intelligence information we managed to get from our end including fingerprints data.

“We do not know how he successfully managed to hide in the UK for 24 years but we never gave up our efforts to bring him back to serve 25 years of a prison sentence.”

There is no evidence he committed any crimes in the UK unlike Albanian Asdrit Kapaj, the Wimbledon prowler who terrorised south west London with burglaries for a decade after also arriving in the UK claiming to be a Kosovan refugee.