Nikola Gruevski fled country days before he was due to be jailed for corruption

The mystery over how Macedonia’s disgraced former prime minister Nikola Gruevski fled his homeland, days before he was due to be jailed for corruption, has deepened amid claims Hungary lied about having helped him escape.

As officials in the capital, Skopje, digested the news of Gruevski’s escape, Albanian authorities announced late on Thursday that he was aided and abetted by Hungarian diplomats.

“Gruevski exited Albanian territory on 11 November as a passenger in a car owned by the embassy of Hungary,” a police statement released in Tirana said.

Revealing the vehicle’s licence plate, it said the car was owned by Budapest’s diplomatic mission in Albania and driven over the country’s northern border into Montenegro.

Hours earlier, Gergely Gulyás, the chief of cabinet of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, confirmed the fugitive leader had sought asylum at a Hungarian representation outside Macedonia but categorically denied Budapest had played any role in facilitating his flight. His asylum request was already being studied.

In power for a decade until his enforced ousting from office in 2016, Gruevski enjoyed close relations with Orbán, whose ardently nationalist views he shared. Highlighting the strength of those ties, the Hungarian government said “for security reasons” it had allowed the convicted politician to have his asylum request submitted and heard at the headquarters of the immigration and asylum office in Budapest.

The former Yugoslav Republic’s social democrat government hit back on Thursday, filing a formal extradition request. An investigation was also launched into whether Gruevski had been helped in his escape by possible accomplices inside the Macedonian police.

Head of the main opposition rightist VMRO party until last year, Gruevski had been stripped of his passport and was purportedly under around-the-clock guard. “He was in and out of court all the time and went out of his way to keep out of the public eye,” one well-placed source told the Guardian. “You’d never see him even in the apartment block where he lived.”

Earlier this week, the discredited leader announced in a Facebook post that he had been forced to flee after “countless” threats against his life. The two-year prison sentence he had received for alleged misuse of public funds in the purchase of an armoured car had, he claimed, been politically motivated, along with an array of charges he also faces in court cases that remain pending.

Gruevski’s hardline policies had played a central role in stoking tensions with neighbouring Greece in the long-running row over the Balkan state’s name.

Speculation in Skopje was rife on Friday that the government may have let Gruevski go in return for VMRO MPs endorsing controversial constitutional changes that will allow the country to change its name to Northern Macedonia.