Did social networks change a young plumber from normal Muslim believer to radical Islamist – or are Albania’s authorities over-reacting to a non-existent threat?
At sunset on August 2, Bledar Zeneli and his father were attending the Aksham Namaz, one of five daily prayers of Muslim believers, when police came knocking at the door of their home in a newly developed area on the outskirts of Durres, Albania second largest town and main seaport.
The officers waited patiently in the hallway as the men finished their prayers. Then they issued an arrest order for 30-year-old Bledar and handcuffed him on charges of “inciting terrorist acts through public calls”.
His father, Osman, was taken aback.
“There were many officers, some in uniform and others in plainclothes,” he said, recalling the event at his home. “They searched the house thoroughly, took away a laptop, his mobile phone and some religious books – whatever they could find,” he added, with a note of disbelief.
The arrest warrant was signed by the Albania’s Special Prosecution Against Organized Crime and Corruption, SPAK, following a two-year investigation by anti-terrorism officers of the Albanian police.
He is charged with using his accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram to spread propaganda in support of so-called Islamic State, IS, and against the international coalition against terrorism.
Zeneli denies the charges, describing his posts as “spreading verses from the Quran,” the Islamic holy book.
Following the collapse of IS in Syria and Iraq, radicalization through the internet has become one of the main concerns of experts on violent extremism.
Albania’s penal code was changed several years ago to address this issue, enabling prosecutors to follow more cases and file charges. However, few such prosecutions have been successful in the courts.
On the outskirts of Durres, in an area known as the “former swamp”, as the place long ago was a swamp that was later drained, a new, sprawling urban settlement has sprung up over the last three decades. It draws a mix of inhabitants from across the country, but mainly from the impoverished mountainous north.
It is a melting pot of identities and political orientations and is fertile ground for preachers of various religions who have rushed to build mosques and churches of different denominations.
Bledar Zeneli, who once went to the local mosque, called Nur (“Light” in Arabic), is known in the neighbourhood as a calm man, a father of two who works as a plumber in a booming construction market. His relatives and friends from the area are surprised by the charges of spreading extremist propaganda.
Resul Cela, imam of the Nur Mosque, believes that various forms of information spread online may be infecting believers. However, he says Zeneli is no different from the other believers who get fragmentary information on social networks and are tempted by controversial theories.
“Information on the net is misinforming the believers, who are often a bit euphoric and lack information, and so fall prey to bad information,” the imam told BIRN. “This [Zeneli] is like a lot of other individuals who at a certain moment get infected by some kind of information without thinking twice,” he added.
‘On Facebook, everything gets posted’
The Zeneli family came from Dardha, a village in Librazhd, a mountainous area in central Albania, some 20 years ago. Osman Zeneli says he eked out a living by selling grilled corn at the beach during the summer while his son trained and worked as a plumber after completing professional highschool in Durres.
He told BIRN that his family has a traditional relationship with the Muslim faith. For example, his own mother fasted in secret during the Communist era, when practising religion was forbidden and disobedience could land the believer in jail. He said his son started to get interested about religion in his early twenties and they both used to go to the mosque together.
However, Osman describes his feelings toward faith as something personal, not related with global conflicts. He describes his son as a hardworking man and says they both were easygoing with others who are not believers or don’t practise religion as much as they do.
“His usual day started early in the morning with his construction site clothes and ended in late afternoon,” he said. “This is our life, the normal life of a worker, the normal life of a common person.”
Neighbours, however, told BIRN that Bledar had gone more and more deeply into his beliefs over the last few years, speaking often about religion and refusing to offer guests raki, the traditional alcoholic beverage.
However, they all described the 30-year-old as calm and peaceful, some calling the prosecution charges “idiotic”.
Haxhi Pici, a friend and relative of the Zeneli family, told BIRN he was baffled by the police action and the arrest of Bledar.
“I couldn’t believe it. We have lived here for 20 years. I never thought of him as somebody who could be a kamikaze, or deal in drugs or human trafficking,” Pici said, with a shrug.
His concern increased when he learned that his neighbour was being kept under arrest while awaiting trial for something he had posted on social networks.
“On Facebook, everything gets posted,” he scoffed, adding: “Albanians have more concrete things to worry about, like poverty and lack of basic infrastructure, such as water and electricity.”
Cela, the imam from the mosque near the Zeneli home, told BIRN that Bledar had not shown up in his mosque for two years, suggesting he probably attended another one. However, he added that, from what he remembered, he wasn’t counter-stream at the time.
“Like other believers, he used to get fragmentary information here and there,” he said, suggesting that people should be careful about what they follow on social media.
“Sentences have a context you might easily miss, especially in short clips. If you separate a single sentence from a sermon, you can go astray,” he warned.
Online radicalization cases seen as rare
Violent extremism in Albania peaked in mid-2010, when several dozens Muslim believers joined Islamic State and other extremist groups fighting in Syria’s multisided civil war.
But the stream of fighters from Albania to Syria dried up after 2015, following increased media attention to the issue, increased awareness and stringent measures imposed by the authorities, who sentenced a network of recruiters and preachers in Tirana to lengthy jail terms.
Online extremism is now considered the main concern by experts, while authorities closely monitor social media and online forums, occasionally filing charges for “inciting terrorist acts and propagandizing for carrying terrorist acts,” offences that carry sentences ranging from four to ten years in prison.
However, security experts see these cases of online radicalization as few and isolated and say they cannot be classified as a dangerous tendency for the country.
“I don’t see any kind of pattern; they are more sporadic cases, resulting from ignorance or strict interpretations by a few individuals. They don’t point to a widespread call for violence or murders,” Fabian Zhilla, an expert working for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, said.
Zhilla said the authorities should show prudence and clearly separate cases of extremism expressed through the denial of the beliefs of the others from extremism that uses violence.
“These cases should be dealt with by the authorities with special care, to ensure adequate evaluation of the danger and proportionate intervention,” he said.
Following his arrest at home, Bledar Zeneli was kept in prison awaiting trial. His case is currently being heard in Durres Court. The charges are based on monitoring his online activity and on information obtained by special methods, a euphemism that the police uses for tapped phone conversations or visual surveillance.
On Facebook, the most popular social network in Albania, he appears under the name Bledar O Zeneli and his usual activity consists of sharing sermons from clerics or religious propaganda videos from the net.
In a comment posted on September 28, 2020, Zeneli expressed astonishment at those who take offence at the hijab or the untrimmed beard, synonymous with Muslim practice, while making slurs about such people’s “wives who are paid to get naked in cheap hotels”.
“Some people astound me. They are concerned by the beard of the Muslim man and the veil of the Muslim women but are not concerned about their own home where ‘fire’ has erupted and the smoke is visible from far away,” he wrote.
“They accuse Muslim women of being paid to keep the veil but fail to see the women of their own homes who are paid to get naked in cheap hotels and come home, one time in a Mercedes, the next in a BMW, sometimes in the evening and other times the next morning,” he wrote.
“I am astounded! They are concerned by Islam in the house of others and not concerned at all by the immorality of their own home.”
In February 2021, he distributed a video from a Facebook page named “Yeta Media” whose titles read: “And surely condemnation is upon you until the Day of Judgment”. The video shows a translation into Albanian of Al-Hijr, one of the chapters of the Muslim holy book.
Osman Zeneli claims his son’s social media posts are just quotations from the Quran and as such, cannot be held accountable. “Quran verses are not forbidden,” he told BIRN. “These verses posted by my son are from the Quran and are more than 1,000 years old,” he added.
He says the Special Prosecution and the Special Courts have spent too much of their time investigating his son.
“We do not deal with the laws,” he concluded. “We do just live our lives.”