North Macedonia’s ex-secret police chief jailed over vote

North Macedonia’s former secret police chief has been sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of unlawfully influencing a local election in 2013.

A court in the capital, Skopje, ruled that Saso Mijalkov, 53, exerted pressure on electoral officials to annul results from some polling stations to allow a candidate to participate in a rerun for mayor.

The court also convicted the head of an ethnic Albanian party and four former electoral commission members over the same case, sentencing them to between three and four-and-a-half years in prison.

Mijalkov, a former senior official in the conservative party that governed the country then known as Macedonia for a decade until 2016, denies wrongdoing.

His lawyers say they will appeal.

He is under house arrest pending trial on other charges.