The police have found 9 9 mm caliber pistol cartridges at the site where 50-year-old Thimjo Rubati, alias Sandër Rubati, was shot, in neighborhood no. 4 of Saranda. The suspicions so far are that the perpetrators, immediately after the incident, left on a motorbike towards the beach area in the neighborhood called “Baba Rexhepi” and then there are suspicions that they used a watercraft. The police combed the area overnight to discover the motorbike used by the two perpetrators.
Although the night before the incident, in the same place, Thimjo Rubati's son, 27-year-old Andrea Rubati, with his two friends, Antonio Lefteri and Çngjëll Dalanaj, raped and threatened police officer Mihal Velco with a knife, the investigation team has excluded this lead from the investigation. The organizers of the assassination may have used it as a moment to divert the investigation. The police, for their part, are investigating various leads, from settling scores to a conflict of ownership, related to the forgery of documents.
Thimjo Rubati has reportedly spent the last two years in prison in Greece, where he was arrested for murder. In 2018, he was sentenced by the Tirana Court to 3 years in prison for the criminal offenses of “Trading and transporting contraband goods” and “Smuggling other goods”, in connection with a vehicle smuggling scheme involving customs officers. But while he was in prison in Greece, the Court of Appeals converted his sentence in 2023 to 2 years of probation, meaning that after his return from Greece, Rubati did not serve a single day in prison for his Albanian sentence. After leaving Greek prison, in January 2024, he was again processed at large by the Saranda police after it was suspected that, in collaboration with another citizen, he had trafficked a “Toyota” vehicle and had changed its identification elements.
In 2021, Thimjo Rubati's name was mentioned in an investigative show, where a citizen's lost identity card was used by Rubati to evade car customs clearance fees.
His criminal record dates back to the early 2000s, when he was arrested in Saranda along with several other people for smuggling. Then, in the early 2000s, he was arrested in Tirana with a gun in his vehicle, following a complaint that a high school student had been taken in a vehicle by Rubati and a friend of his from Saranda. After these events, Thimjo Rubati was involved in the trafficking and smuggling of stolen vehicles from Greece to Albania and for this he also has criminal records.
His son, citizen Andrea Rubati, also turns out to be a person with a criminal record, arrested in June 2022, after being caught driving a vehicle that turned out to be stolen in Italy. In June of this year, according to police sources, he is suspected of having fled a FNSH checkpoint, and has been wanted for 48 hours for threatening and raping police officer Mihal Velco.
