Hitman, 24, who dressed as a litter picker is found GUILTY of Beqiri murder

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A Swedish underworld assassin who travelled to the UK to carry out a Christmas Eve hit on a reality TV star’s brother on the doorstep of his £1.7million London townhouse was today convicted of his murder.

Flamur ‘Alex’ Beqiri, 36, a father of two whose sister Misse Beqiri appeared in Real Housewives Of Cheshire, was blasted nine times in two seconds with a semi-automatic pistol in front of his wife and their two-year-old son. 

Harrowing CCTV footage shot around 9pm on December 24, 2019, showed Beqiri being peppered with bullets moments after arriving hand-in-hand with his wife, Deborah, from dinner at a restaurant on Sloane Square. She was seen screaming and cradling the child. 

The shooter, kickboxer Anis Hemissi, 24, carried out a four-hour reconnaissance mission two days before the hit disguised as a litter picker, donning a high-vis jacket and trousers, sunglasses and a full-face latex mask. 

His bizarre outfit and the amount of time he was taking to clean just a small stretch of pavement attracted the attention of neighbours, and he was confronted by a dog walker who asked what he was doing. 

He made several errors, including litter picking on both a public and a private road – not realising that in the UK these would be covered by a separate authorities. 

Meanwhile, his choice of a brightly-coloured sit up and beg bike, which in Sweden is considered unisex but in Britain is mainly used by women, meant he stood out and it was easier for witnesses to remember him. 

Following the shooting, a rapid CCTV trawl over the following days allowed detectives to trace him on foot, then by bicycle from Battersea Church Road down the Thames path to a flat in Oyster Wharf. 

Hemissi was today found guilty of murder and possession of a firearm at Southwark Crown Court after a two-month trial.

Fellow Swedish national Estevan Pino-Munizaga, 35, was acquitted of murder but found guilty of an alternative charge of manslaughter.

Tobias Andersson, 32, and Bawer Karaer, 23, also from Sweden, were acquitted of both charges.

Clifford Rollox, 31, from Islington, north London, and Dutch national Claude Isaac Castor, 31, from Sint Maarten in the Caribbean, were found guilty of perverting the course of justice after being hired locally to clean up the flat where the killers had stayed. 

Beqiri – a major figure in Swedish organised crime – was the latest victim of a string of ‘tit for tat’ shootings as his gang battled for domination of the market for smuggling drugs into Sweden from Spain and the Netherlands.   

Moments after the shooting his wife, Deborah, called her husband’s associate Naief Adawi, 37, who had also moved to Battersea from Sweden, to warn him: ‘Maybe someone’s coming for you as well. Watch out.’ 

Adawi, who was jailed for eight years in Denmark in 2010 for aggravated robbery with a lethal weapon over a £7 million heist on a security firm – one of the largest heists in the country’s history – had already survived one attempt on his life.

Gunmen opened fire as he left his Malmo apartment on August 26, 2019, carrying his newborn baby daughter, who was dropped but not injured as Adawi ran away.

But his partner Karolin Hakim, 31, was shot multiple times and killed.

Close friends Adawi and Beqiri were both kingpins in the Swedish drugs gang run by Daniel Petrovski, 38, who was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment last June for an aggravated drugs offence.

They were locked in a bloody war with a rival organised crime group headed by Amir Mekky, 24, who was also involved in large-scale trafficking of cocaine and cannabis and arrested in Dubai in June 2020.

Violence between the two gangs, including kidnap and murder, escalated from the middle of 2018 and by the following summer both Adawi and Beqiri had become targets.

But Mekky’s men were not Beqiri’s only enemies – police intelligence suggests he was regularly in dispute with, or in debt to, criminal associates, including Albanian gangs.

Beqiri had installed a top-of-the-range CCTV system in his £1.7 million Battersea townhouse and when dining out he would send his wife in first and sit facing the door.

On the night he was murdered she had sat at the table in a Sloane Square restaurant, taken a photo and sent it to him before he joined her.

Beqiri was right to be cautious.

However, the CCTV camera he hoped would protect his family instead captured, with shocking clarity and sound, the moment a masked assassin shot him dead from behind with a semi-automatic handgun, firing 10 times.

Seconds earlier Beqiri had arrived home from dinner hand-in-hand with Ms Krasniqi and their two-year-old son, while their three-month-old baby and the children’s three grandparents were inside.

In graphic footage, Ms Krasniqi can be heard screaming and is seen cradling the boy as her husband drops to the floor, having been hit by eight bullets.

The couple, who made a £950,000 down payment on their home and also rented a property in Dubai, had married a little over a year earlier in Cernobbio, by Lake Como, Italy, with pictures of the happy occasion published in Grace Ormonde Wedding Style magazine.

Ms Krasniqi told the publication they ‘fell deeply in love’ at the wedding of his sister, when the Real Housewives Of Cheshire star Misse Beqiri married former Manchester United goalkeeper Anders Lindegaard. 

Beqiri, who had joint Swedish and Albanian nationality, claimed to be in the music business but had been involved in the international drugs trade from Spain, through the Netherlands and into Scandinavia since 2007 and had been arrested several times in Europe.

In 2018, he was named as one of Sweden’s most wanted men after investigators said he was part of an international drugs smuggling ring who moved £2million of cannabis into Scandinavia. 

At the time, police said Beqiri fled a bust at the border in bare feet but the drugs charges were later dropped, and he was instead found guilty of illegally handling smuggled goods including cigarettes and alcohol and given a suspended sentence. 

Zakaria El-Khayyati, a member of the rival Mekky gang, was murdered in July 2018 after he was arrested and released over the kidnap of Petrovski’s younger brother a month earlier.

Two men linked to the murder of Adawi’s partner, Tarek Bekar and Gabriel Hassoun, were involved in part of the money chain that led to the booking of accommodation in London by one of Beqiri’s killers, Estevan Pino-Munizaga, 35, in July 2019.

Hassoun was later convicted of possession of a firearm but while under surveillance by Swedish police he was seen to wear a bullet proof vest and frequently change his clothes and hairstyle.

Swedish police detective inspector Kajsa Delmar-Wigstrom said Adawi has recently been arrested and charged, along with 15 other people, including Petrovski, with offences including attempted murder, preparation to commit murder, instigation to commit murder and illegal possession of firearms.

The detective said the targets, including the Mekky gang’s Hassoun, and twins Frank and Liam Al Janabi, were selected because they were believed to be behind his partner’s murder.

During earlier police surveillance, the Al Janabi brothers were seen trying on latex masks they had bought from a party shop.

They were similar to those used by Beqiri gunman Anis Hemissi, 24, to carry out the shooting and conduct reconnaissance, including while dressed as a litter picker, in the days before the murder.

Professional kickboxer Hemissi was earlier arrested over the February 2, 2018 murder of a man who was shot dead around the back of the Malmo home of his father, but he was never charged.

Khaled Hemissi, then 55, was one of the first on the scene and tried to save the victim’s life, at first fearing it was his son who had been shot.

‘My wife thought it was our son because he had a similar jacket,’ he told local media.

Ahmet Karaer, the elder cousin of Bawer Karaer, 23, who sourced the bicycle used by Hemissi to flee the scene of the Beqiri shooting, was said by prosecutor Mark Heywood QC to have helped with the ‘planning, money movement and most probably in the giving of instructions’.

Bawer Karaer told jurors his cousin had told him he was going to London to help out with a burglary and he was found not guilty of killing Beqiri.

Ahmet Karaer’s family were the victims of an extortion plot which escalated into a bombing campaign in January 2020.

The targets were the apartments of his parents and the parents of his partner, Azadeh Etesamipour.

It is not known whether the bombings were connected to the feud, but Swedish police have discovered Karaer was heavily in debt due to his gambling addiction and may have borrowed money from a notorious criminal gang called the ‘Death Patrol’.

He was held in Egypt in February 2020 suspected of smuggling narcotics and according to flight records was put on a plane back to Sweden in August with a re-entry ban – but he did not arrive.

Tobias Andersson, 32, who was also acquitted of killing Beqiri, 32, was in contact with Karaer, having also travelled to Egypt for the drug deal, Southwark Crown Court heard.

Karaer’s whereabouts remain unknown to British and Swedish police, and he is the subject of a European arrest warrant.