Albanian PM meets Kosovo ex-leader held on war crime charges

TIRANA, Albania (AP) — Albania’s prime minister has visited Kosovo’s ex-president Hashim Thaci in a prison in The Netherlands, where he is being held pending trial for alleged war crimes. Edi Rama told journalists after Tuesday’s meeting that Thaci believed his trial would provide a way of demonstrating “in front of justice the purity of the liberating war” that Albanian separatists fought in 1998-1999 against Serbian forces. In 2020 Thaci resigned as Kosovo’s president and was flown to The Hague to face charges including war crimes, murder, torture and persecution — all which he has denied.