schema:articleBody
| - North Macedonia's former secret service chief was put under house arrest Tuesday after he had gone missing for several days ahead of a court verdict on his role in a wiretapping scandal. Saso Mijalkov's disappearance had triggered a police 48-hour manhunt in the Balkan state, an international arrest warrant and wall-to-wall media coverage. But the 55-year-old reappeared Tuesday afternoon at a court in Skopje to pick up an order for his house arrest. He had not been trying to evade justice but had simply been in "isolation" with coronavirus-like symptoms, he told reporters. "I want to apologise to the Macedonian public for the inconvenience," Mijalkov said, repeating that he would not flee. After Mijalkov re-emerged, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev wrote on Facebook that "justice has been secured" and his house arrest was being enforced. Mijalkov, who led North Macedonia's secret police for almost a decade, is accused of organising an illegal surveillance campaign during the regime of former prime minister Nikola Gruevski. Prosecutors say it included the wiretapping of more than 20,000 people between 2008 and 2015. The verdict in his case is expected Friday. When he could not be found after a house arrest order was issued on Sunday, police swarmed the capital Skopje. Officers randomly stopped vehicles and searched the premises of the Marriott hotel, which Mijalkov's family partially owns and that he regularly frequented. The fiasco drew comparison to Mijalkov's cousin Gruevski, who after being forced from office fled to Hungary to avoid a two-year prison sentence for corruption in 2018. The wiretapping scandal provoked a political crisis in the Balkan country in 2015, leading to months of protests and, eventually, snap elections that ended Gruevski's right-wing regime and brought Zaev to power. dd/ssm/jj
|