Despite being accused of raping a 17-year-old girl, he continued to roam free for more than two years. Palestinian Mustafa Alnajjar, known to the public as the former partner of prominent Freedom Movement party (Gibanje Svoboda) figure Faila Pašić Bišić, is now finally behind bars. Together with eleven other defendants, the prosecution is prosecuting him as one of the members of a wide-ranging criminal ring that recruited victims for prostitution, smuggled migrants, and trafficked drugs.
Just how dysfunctional the Slovenian justice system really is has been demonstrated by the fact that the alleged rapist walked free for more than two years after the rape. Whether the 27-year-old Palestinian was helped by “acquaintances” from the Freedom Movement party or by other political elite, we cannot say, but the fact is that Mustafa Alnajjar is finally where he should have been for more than two years.
Accused of raping a young woman who was not yet of age, the Palestinian asylum seeker has been working as a taxi driver ever since. According to the magazine Reporter, this ended a few days ago, when a final police operation was launched, which saw him and 11 other suspects taken into custody. They are accused of luring 43 victims to Slovenia to recruit them for prostitution. These girls are from the Dominican Republic, some from Slovenia, and most from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. They were lured into prostitution, the police explained, on the pretext of rich remuneration for giving massages.
The ring was also involved in migrant smuggling. The group mainly involved taxi drivers. According to the media, most of those arrested are Slovenian citizens (with roots in Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Alnajjar was an extremely valuable link for them, as he speaks Arabic.
The police in this case were directed by prosecutor Blanka Žgajnar from the Specialised State Prosecutor’s Office (another prosecutor is in charge of Alnajjar’s rape case), whose work was assessed as very good. The Slovenian State Prosecutor’s Office confirmed the news to the magazine Reporter, stating that they had ordered the detention of eleven suspects and house arrest for one.
The offences in question are abuse, prostitution, drug trafficking and illegal crossing of the border or the territory of the country (smuggling of migrants).
Alnajjar was known as a supporter of the Freedom Movement party
It is also important to note that during the Fotopub affair, the information came out that the then-intimate partner of Faila Pašić Bišić was suspected of raping a 17-year-old girl. Although he claimed he was innocent, he threatened the media outlet (Reporter) at the time not to publish his name. Nevertheless, the prosecution did not propose his detention at the time, saying that “there were no grounds for detention”, and even the date of the main hearing was not known for a long time afterwards. Alnajjar did not want media attention for his alleged rape, but he certainly received another kind of attention when, by a turn of events, he even found himself at a Freedom Movement party at their electoral headquarters on the eve of the elections, on the 24th of April last year.
He was brought there by his partner at the time, the well-known humanitarian and activist Faila Pašić, who worked at the Freedom Movement electoral headquarters. They broke up a few months after the elections. Whether it was only a fictitious break-up, due to the notoriety of the case, is not known. However, Alnajjar is eternalised in photographs together with the two (former) vice-presidents of the Freedom Movement party, Urška Klakočar Zupančič and Marta Kos.
A. H.
