Mehmet Shehu (10 January 1913 – 17 December 1981) was Prime Minister of Albania (as Chairman of the Council of Ministers) from 20 July 1954 to 17 December 1981, succeeding Enver Hoxha and preceding Adil Carcani.
Biography[]
Mehmet Shehu was born on 10 January 1913 in Corrush, Albania, the son of a Muslim imam. After failing to enter the Ministry of Agriculture, he went to the Nunziatella Military Academy in Naples, Italy on a scholarship, only to be expelled for his pro-communist sympathies. In 1937, he volunteered to fight for the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and he was sent to internment camps in both France and Italy after fleeing Spain at the end of the war. He joined the Italian Communist Party in Italy before his 1942 return to Albania, and he joined the Albanian Resistance to fight against the Royal Italian Army. From 1944 to 1945, he served as a member of the Albanian provisional government, and he became a General and Chief of the General Staff of the Albanian Armed Forces after the end of World War II.
From 1948 onwards, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Party of Labor of Albania, and he also served as Minister of the Interior from 1948 to 1954, leading the Sigurimi secret police. He had opponents of the regime and underground fighters executed, and he was the right-had man of Enver Hoxha for 40 years. However, he would be accused of spying on Albania for the Soviet Union's KGB, the United States' CIA, and the Yugoslavian government, and he was executed in his Tirana bedroom on 17 December 1981 with a bullet to his head. The government claimed that he had killed himself after suffering a nervous breakdown, but Shehu's opposition to Hoxha's isolationism and his alleged spying were said to have been causes for the government to assassinate him.