Last Years
Shehu was considered to be Enver Hoxha's right hand man and the second most important person in Albania. For 40 years Hoxha was Shehu's friend and closest comrade. Shehu was one of those who prepared the Chinese-Albanian alliance and the break with the Soviet Union (December 1961). It is claimed that in 1981 Shehu opposed Enver Hoxha's isolationism. He was accused of being a Yugoslav spy.
On December 17, 1981, he was found dead in his bedroom in Tirana with a bullet wound to his head. According to the official announcement (December 18), he had committed suicide in a nervous breakdown. This was a crime under Albanian law. Shehu was declared to be a "people's enemy" and was buried in a wasteland near the village of Ndroq near Tirana. Shehu's son later launched a campaign to prove that his father had, in fact, been murdered. After his death Shehu was claimed to have been an agent of not only the Yugoslav secret services, but also the CIA and the KGB. In Hoxha's book Titoites (1982) several chapters are dedicated to Shehu's denunciation. Shehu disappeared from the official communist history of Albania. Shehu's widow Fiqerete (born Sanxhaktari) and two of his sons were arrested without any explanation and later imprisoned on different pretexts.
After the fall of Communism and his release from prison in 1991, Mehmet Shehu's younger son Bashkim started seeking his father's remains. On November 19, 2001, it was announced that Mehmet Shehu's remains had been found.
A fictionalised account of Mehmet Shehu's fall and death is the subject of Ismail Kadare's novel The Successor (2003).
Read more about this topic: Mehmet Shehu
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