A week before it is supposed to begin, lawyer, Brynjar Meling, doesn’t know if the case of alleged terrorism against Mulla Krekar, in the Italian city of Bolzano, is happening.
The court in Bolzano brought the terrorism case against Mullah Krekar and five others to begin on the 23rd of October. However, neither Krekar himself, nor his defence lawyer in Norway, Brynjar Meling, have heard anything about the imminent litigation process.
‘We haven’t received any information, nothing has been proclaimed, and Krekar also has no Italian lawyer,’ said Meling to NTB news.
No travel documents
‘Krekar is not charged with anything, and he has been acquitted in Norway.
Furthermore, he has a travel ban in Norway, and has no travel documents.
So there are a lot of things that are not in place before a trial can begin anywhere else than in Norway’, said Meling.
The trial of Krekar, which was supposed to have started in March, was delayed when Krekar’s then public defender, Italian Enrica Franzini, requested that the translation of telephone conversations between six alleged terrorists should be verified by experts, as she believed they could be misunderstood.
The court rejected this, but still challenged the trial because the prosecuting authority gave the court even more intercepted conversations, which had to be translated from Kurdish.
Since the postponement in March, Franzini has been released from his position as defence for Krekar, and nobody else has been appointed, so far as Meling has been advised.
Franzini told NTB news that in that case, she didn’t know. At the same time, the lawyer hasn’t ruled out that a nomination for a change has been delivered to Bolzano, but she has not been able to travel there lately.
‘I am personally appointed as defence for Krekar, unless he appoints somebody else,
something that he is within his rights to do,’ she stated.
Case dropped
Krekar is a free man as he waits in anticipation of the reported trial that the Italian authorities have raised against him and several others. Surprisingly enough for Norwegian authorities, the petition against Krekar was dropped after the PST worked hard to get Norwegian courts to expel the Iraqi Kurdish man last year.
© NTB Scanpix / Norway Today
