Election fraud trial ‘Titanic 2″ adjourned for May 10

A trial for voting fraud in the 2013 local elections, after the Special Public Prosecution (SPO) raised indictments in its case dubbed ‘Titanic 2’, was adjourned for May 10.

On Tuesday, a judge accepted a request of the defense team for postponing the trial saying the lawyers needed time to read the consolidated text of the indictments handed out by a prosecutor at the hearing.

The consolidated text excludes the part involving five judges of the Administrative Court over which the court rejected the indictments filed by the SPO,  tasked with investigating high-level crime in Macedonia.

DPA leader Meduh Thaci, Saso Mijalkov, the ex-head of the Administration for Security for Counterintelligence (UBK), who are defendants in the case, arrived in the Criminal Court on Tuesday morning. Other defendants include four former members of the State Election Commission.

Some illegally wiretapped conversations, released to the public by the then opposition party SDSM, have been accepted to be used as evidence in court. They reveal secretly tapped phone calls between Mijalkov and Thaci agreeing how the SEC members should vote with respect to complaints.