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EU rule-of-law mission (EULEX) special prosecutor Maria Bamieh said on Wednesday that the European judicial organisation tolerated graft because it failed to investigate her allegations and suspended her from her job instead.

“They are giving out the message that they are not serious about corruption, because if they were serious about it, they would be dealing with it in EULEX,” Bamieh told BIRN in an interview.

“In Kosovo, we rely on whistleblowers to deal with corruption and if they go around punishing them, they are saying that it’s OK to punish people that make allegations of corruption,” she said.

Bamieh this week accused her former EULEX colleague, Italian judge Francesco Florit, of taking a 300,000 euro bribe to release a Kosovo man accused of murder.

But Florit, who is now working as a judge in Udine in Italy, told BIRN Kosovo in an interview that EULEX did investigate him and found no proof that he was corrupt.

“I have never received, and never been offered, any bribe from anyone,” Florit said.

He said that he was ready to come to Kosovo and answer any questions about the accusations.

“I tell you, those are all lies. I am telling you that there is nothing true in it,” he said.

Bamieh also accused EULEX of repeatedly failing to address her suspicions about Florit.

“For two years I tried to get them to do something about what I had discovered. There was enough suspicion to open an investigation but they never did that,” she said.

Florit said however that an ‘administrative investigation’ was conducted by EULEX but ended when no proof was found that he took a bribe.

“I was contacted by EULEX and I came to Pristina for an interview. At that time this was internal investigation,” he said.

The EU also said it had been probing the claims.

“Since 2013, EULEX and Kosovo judicial authorities have been pursuing a joint investigation into these allegations. Due diligence has therefore been applied thoroughly, in line with what is at the heart of EULEX’s efforts, namely the fight against corruption and impunity,” said a statement from the EU in Brussels.

The graft allegations became public in documents published by Kosovo newspaper Koha Ditore this week.

But Bamieh denied passing the documents to the newspaper and said she only decided to speak out because EULEX suspended her.

“They suspended me for giving documents to the press, which I didn’t do. I never gave documents to Koha Ditore. That suspension destroyed my image in Kosovo, so I had to go public,” she said.

She also accused EULEX of threatening her with arrest for violating secrecy legislation by making restricted prosecution documents public.

She said that the threat was implicit in an internal email sent to all EULEX staff which said: “Any disclosure of any document within SPRK [the Kosovo Special Prosecution Office] will be considered a violation of the secrecy of proceedings, which is an offence in Kosovo, and that person will have their immunity lifted and will be arrested.”

“This was directed at me,” Bamieh said. “The only way I could protect myself was by going public.”

EULEX has refused to comment on her claims directly but has said that she was suspended amid an inquiry into the leaking of documents.

“Whistleblowing does not mean you can leak confidential documents to the media, especially when a process has already been taken forward by the organisation,” EULEX said in a statement published by AFP news agency.

Bamieh said this week that she discovered by reading telephone intercepts that Italian judge Florit went to Albania to receive the 300,000 euro bribe to free the three suspects in the murder case that she was investigating. Only one of them was released, however.

Flurim Hasani, the brother of one of the suspects, told BIRN that he gave an interview to EULEX on June 25 last year, admitting that the money was handed over to Florit in Durres in Albania in order to free Besnik Hasani, Shpend Qerimi and Nusret Cena.

“We thought that 300,000 [euro] would suffice to release all three men but instead what happened is that the lawyer told us that the money was enough to release only one man, so only Nusret Cena was released and my brother is still in jail for a murder he did not commit,” Hasani said.

Bamiah has also accused Florit of seeking a bribe in another case she was investigating, against the general secretary of the Ministry of Health, Ilir Tolaj, who was under suspicion of corrupt dealings in medicine tenders.

Florit however accused Bamieh of denouncing him because she was unhappy about the way she was treated by EULEX.

“In my opinion, this is her revenge. Because she had problems in her office and in the end she was suspended,” he said.

EULEX deals with cases of organised crime, corruption and war crimes which are considered too important or sensitive to be handled by the Kosovo judiciary.