FLASH
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Gary Kokalari, the Albanian-American activist, has spoken about the Gërdec explosion. During the interview for "Real Story", he recounted his meeting with Kosta Trebicka, saying that they knew each other before the Gërdec incident.
Excerpt from the interview
-In my office I have hanging the New York Times edition dated March 27th, which talks about the ammunition that was dismantled in Gërdec and repackaged for Afghanistan. You had a role in publishing this article, which Mr. Berisha, you know, called it.
Geri Kokalari: A toilet paper
-It was a toilet paper that shook American and Albanian politics. You had a role in this article, you had a very strong controlling activity towards the two governments. What was your role?
Geri Kokalari: I like to think of myself as a person with a light, and I find cockroaches and usually cockroaches go away when I shine the light on them but I knew Kosta Trebicka from before, before this affair. He contacted me in New York for business reasons. He knew I was involved in business and wanted to meet me, and we stayed in touch over the years. I actually saw him during the war in Kosovo I was in Tirana and I met him during that time. We lost touch a bit and then he was making a bit of noise and at that time I think he felt he wasn't given a proper deal for the arms contract. When he called me he said 'Geri I have some recordings of the talks. I didn't know anything about Diveroli at that time, there are some copies of the contracts there are various documents and there is information about the company in Cyprus. He said you will see them, I said definitely, I would be very interested to see them. We started talking about this and I thought it was very important to expose. Someone like Berisha and his son were operating in secret and I put the spotlight on them. I looked for a while at different people in the American media and the Albanian media we could have done it very easily but I knew the impact would be very limited, it would be a story in Albania and then it would die within a week. And I knew that to have an impact you had to be on an international platform and I asked around for some people and I came across a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. I didn't know it at the time but he was also the world's leading expert on firearms. I contacted him and said this is the story, this is the deal they want to sell Chinese weapons would you be interested? He said why not, why wouldn't I be interested. That was the spark that lit the fire. We spent a very long time, we have to understand that when Costa contacted me about this it was the end of the summer that article came out in March of 2008. It took the New York Times 6 months to confirm the information. There were 6 to 8 different journalists working from different continents, from the Middle East, from New York, and they were looking at it in detail before they broke the news. And it happened to be a coincidence that the news was published just a few days after the Gërdec explosion.
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