"Panic Code", the journalist shows how Vis Martinaj, Behar Bajri and Pëllumb Gjoka were camouflaged on the Sky network

The journalist of Top Channel, Dorjana Bezat, invited to the show Top Story, has shown how the heads of crime in our country were camouflaged through the Sky network.

She explains that crime figures who may be arrested or still wanted used a 6-digit code consisting of numbers and capital letters, instead of names.

"Sky operated with a code, you didn't have your name, you had a 6-digit code, a mixture of capital letters and numbers, of underworld figures who are wanted or who have been arrested. The first code that is (on the screen in the studio) MHSE7L belongs to the former prosecutor Xhefahir Lita and so on. That is the person's code. There was a Sky app that if you panicked about being tracked by the police you entered a panic code and all your chats were deleted. Inside the app was an alternative called a panic code, where if you clicked on this code and entered a code of your own that you solved, all communications you had made on the Sky network were erased and irreversible. There were also alternatives that the messages for a period of time that the user thought were deleted, on the mobile phone they were not, but on the server they were. There was an app that if you didn't open it for a time you set, the account was unusable. Behar Bajri had two Sky, two accounts, maybe that's why the panic pin is unusable. Between them they could only communicate through messages and could not send videos", said Bezat.

In addition, the journalist has revealed details about the special phone that was used by the world of crime and drug barons to communicate through the SKY ECC application.

Bezat showed how European justice was able to get hold of SKY ECC's central server and then used it to track down criminals.

Excerpts from the debate:

Bezat: S This was a communication platform that served and was sold freely because it was a communication platform like any other until it was overrun by criminal groups, mainly for drug trafficking, drug-related communications. This engaged the police and justice in European countries to capture this server. The server was captured, many accounts were decrypted, and some interesting data emerged within them, which European countries have begun to unravel, and there have been many operations.

Since 2021, there has been a very positive balance, we can mention England, which identifies many users in this network. More than 1,000 were charged and 380 served time for crimes that were proven through SKY communications.

To be on SKY you first had to buy a mobile phone that was adapted for this app. The phone was from companies currently operating in the market, only it was processed so that it did not have active GPS or a functional audio and camera system. Lacking these options, it was reliable for criminals to use and not be tracked by the authorities. This worked for several years, until 2021 when the server fell into the hands of the authorities and since then many justices have started decoding and using this information to identify criminal groups.

It is worth noting that Albania is the last country in the Balkans that is using these communications, as we have previous precedents in Croatia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina or in Montenegro, where hundreds of arrests are counted only through the breakdown of conversations on SKY.

Duma: How many codes are Albanian? How many are known?

Bezat: More than 1000, maybe 1600.

Duma: Where are they being decrypted?

Bezat: In France. And mainly France worked with BKH and SPAK, initially only 5 codes were handed over where during a narcotics investigation, these people turned out to be Albanians. So I take the matter to BKH.