Albanian MP Bought Armoured Car for 'Assassin'

The former Socialist Party MP who last week accused the Speaker of Parliament, Ilir Meta, of plotting his murder on Thursday said he learned of the plot after the assassin repented and told him the details.

Tom Doshi said the assassin told him that Meta had paid him 500,000 euro to kill him and an opposition Democratic Party MP, Mhill Fufi.

Doshi has been expelled from the Socialist parliamentary group for his attacks on the government.

Meta is the head of the Socialist Movement for Integration, LSI, the junior government partner in the center-left ruling coalition of Prime Minister Edi Rama.

One of the richest MPs in parliament, Doshi heads a list of Albanian politicians indentified in a 2009 US embassy cable, leaked by WikiLeaks, entitled "lawbreakers turned lawmakers, as having ties to organized crime.

After the learning of the plot, Doshi says he went to Interior Minister Saimir Tahiri, Prime Minister Rama and General Prosecutor Adriatik Llala with the alleged assassin and his taped confession but the authorities failed to investigate the case.

The MP claimed that he became so close to his alleged assassin that he bought him an armoured car.

"I bought an armoured car for him because I was worried for his life," Doshi told Top Channel TV.

After Doshi went public with the videotaped confession of his alleged assassin on Wednesday, the General Prosecutor's office launched a probe into the case.

But, to add to the confusion, according to media reports, when the alleged assassin was questioned by prosecutors, he recanted the murder plot story and said Doshi had paid him to concoct it.

Prime Minister Rama and Speaker Meta have shrugged of the allegations as farcical, saying they are only intended to...