North Macedonia Ex-Speaker Faces Trial Over Parliament Rampage

The former speaker of parliament in North Macedonia, Trajko Veljanoski, faces trial together with former transport minister Mile Janakieski, former education minister Spiro Risteski and former secret police chief Vladimir Atanasovski, after the Skopje Criminal Court on Thursday said it had accepted the charges pressed against them.

The Organised Crime Prosecution charged them with taking a leading part in the April 27 2017 storming of parliament, which injured more than 100 people, including MP's and journalists.

Asked to comment on the charges, Veljanoski briefly responded to a local TV station on Thursday, via SMS, that he saw them as "political charges for political purposes".

Veljanoski and the others, all members of the former ruling VMRO DPMNE party, are accused of "terrorist endangerment of constitutional order", as organisers of the event locally known as "bloody Thursday".

Veljanoski, who was in office from 2008 until 2017, will be the first speaker of parliament in North Macedonia since its independence in the early 1990s to face trial.

The investigation into who organised the mob attack included former prime minister and former VMRO DPMNE leader Nikola Gruevski and former intelligence officer Nikola Boskoski.

However, the court decided that they will not be put on trial because they are not in the country. Gruevski fled a two-an-a-half year prison term for corruption in October 2018, and was granted asylum in Hungary.

As prime minister from 2006 until 2016, he was widely accused of authoritarianism and of fostering corruption. He was brought down following revelations of illegal mass wiretapping.

Boskovski fled to Greece in July 2017 and has since obtained asylum there, after a court ordered his arrest in...