Albanian

No responsible Dad wants his 17-year-old daughter jetting off to Europe in the company of a party-hardy girlfriend, under the care of dubious - and perhaps nonexistent - chaperones. But when Dad is an ex-CIA agent and his little girl is abducted within hours of touching down in Paris, it's time for some serious parental intervention. And so, with a 96-hour window before Kim (Maggie Grace) disappears forever into a sordid underworld of Albanian sex traffickers, Bryan Mills - Liam Neeson, making a surprisingly good action hero - flies from the City of Angels to the City of Light to track his offspring.

In March 1986, Gasper Gjekaj, a New York real estate agent, sponsored his young cousin's move from Albania to the United States. He said his cousin, Pjerin Gjekaj, 21, stayed at his home in Ossining, N.Y., for six months before the young man left with friends and headed for South Jersey in September. The two remained in contact. On July 8, Gasper Gjekaj received a phone call from his cousin informing him that the young man had been charged with attempted murder. Today, Pjerin Gjekaj is being held in Gloucester County Jail after failing to post $111,000 bail on charges that he and four other men, whom Deptford police have called an Albanian hit squad, tried to murder an employee of the Five Points Diner in Deptford on July 6. The five are charged with assault with intent to murder, conspiracy to commit murder and possession of a deadly weapon, a .44-magnum handgun.

He shares it with the hums and rattles of a washer, dryer and water heater. From its ceiling, a handmade gutter keeps water from dripping into the colored oils below. But this laundry room, at the rear of a New Buckley Street garage, is a mansion to Ligor Luarasi of Albania. In the room his daughter set aside for him, Luarasi, 57, is free to paint themes true to his soul, far away from the bullets, poverty and Communist oppression that he lived under for so long. "It's the Book over all the rest of the books," says Meri Barboni, 27, translating her father's Albanian words as he holds his favorite still life - an open Bible surrounded by a globe, a candle, flowers and gourds.

Enkeleida Shkoza, a native of Albania who helped Temple capture its second straight Atlantic Ten volleyball championship last fall, is seeking political asylum in America. Shkoza's lawyer, Bill Stock, said that neither he nor his client would comment on the matter. "It's private," Stock said. It was not known when Shkoza initiated the process that, if successful, would allow her to remain in the United States, but her move preceded the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, which has sent thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo streaming into her homeland.

Agim Gashi left his family's crime business in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, in 1992 and ended up in this fashion mecca, where police say he became a boss in prostitution and heroin rings stretching from the ports of Albania to the poppy fields of Turkey. He is one of hundreds of Balkan bad guys - mainly ethnic Albanians - reportedly moving onto turf long controlled by the Italian Mafia. Most of Gashi's illicit profits fueled criminal enterprises across Europe. But some, according to Western drug-enforcement agencies, were siphoned off to buy night-vision glasses, Kalashnikovs and bullet-proof vests for the Kosovo Liberation Army's war against Yugoslav troops.

Adriana Fusha looked on with joy as her son acted like a healthy 3-year-old, popping chocolates into his mouth one minute, wrapping his arms around her the next, then scaling furniture like a daredevil. Moments later, the 27-year-old Albanian woman broke down sobbing. That's what happens when a mother spends every moment of every day fighting to keep her child alive. Beneath Enes Fusha's Teletubbies shirt is a scarred chest that hides a deformed heart. With every beat, that heart is destroying his lungs, a defect that went undiagnosed in his impoverished homeland.

On Sunday night - ten days after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic signed a deal for peace, four days after Yugoslav army commanders agreed to pull out of Kosovo and two days after NATO peacekeeping forces first entered the province - Serb paramilitaries knocked on Isa Bala's door and murdered most of his family. Bala, a butcher, had stayed in his home throughout the war while Pec burned around him because he had no way to flee with his paralyzed mother. By last weekend, he thought the worst was over.

The United States and its NATO allies are prepared to launch air strikes against Serbian targets as early as this weekend to end the killing and displacement of ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, two Clinton administration officials said yesterday. Support for strikes is likely to grow following the reports yesterday of a gruesome massacre of 16 ethnic Albanian civilians in the village of Gornje Obrinje. Western reporters found that 10 of the 16 were women, children or elderly.

The big concern of most American rock stars is usually how to get a hit song and a national tour, but Albanian rocker Dritan Xheladini's major fear these days is for his life. The musician has spent the last five months at the federal immigration detention center here, and as he prepares for a political-asylum hearing next month, he is contending that if deported, his life would be in jeopardy because his music has become closely associated with Albania's beleaguered Democratic Party.

One hour before she was scheduled to leave Philadelphia yesterday for her homeland, an Albanian mother with an ailing 3-year-old son received surprising news: A nonprofit children's health organization was stepping in with a last-ditch effort to save the boy. The Children's Health Information Network said it would pay to postpone Adriana Fusha's return flight to Albania until Wednesday, when her visa expires. The delay will provide enough time for a heart surgeon in Michigan to review the condition of Fusha's son, Enes.

FRANKFURT, Germany - The Islamic extremist who killed two U.S. airmen in an attack at the Frankfurt airport last year was convicted of murder Friday and sentenced to life in prison. Arid Uka, 22, was also convicted of attempted murder and causing serious bodily harm for wounding two other servicemen and for taking aim at a third before his 9mm pistol jammed. Uka killed Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, of South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, of Virginia, in the March 2 attack on an Air Force security team headed for Afghanistan.

BERLIN - German prosecutors said Thursday they had filed murder charges against a 21-year-old Kosovo Albanian in the shooting deaths of two U.S. airmen outside Frankfurt's airport, and alleged he was inspired by online jihadist videos to kill Americans. Arid Uka, who grew up in Germany, was charged July 4 with two counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder in connection with the March 2 attack. If convicted, he faces a possible life sentence. Authorities have said that Uka confessed shortly after his capture at the airport to wanting to kill American troops because of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan.

By Francine Prose Harper. 320 pp. $25.99 Reviewed by Susan Balée If Chelsea Handler had written a novel about an Albanian immigrant working as a nanny in a New Jersey bedroom community, it would sound a lot like My New American Life . The joke's the thing, so forget real Albanians here. The audience is American, not foreign, and the point is to skewer our own pretensions by pretending to see them through a foreigner's viewpoint. Prose, then, gives us Lula, the Albanian orphan working as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant in New York City, her tourist visa about to expire.

No responsible Dad wants his 17-year-old daughter jetting off to Europe in the company of a party-hardy girlfriend, under the care of dubious - and perhaps nonexistent - chaperones. But when Dad is an ex-CIA agent and his little girl is abducted within hours of touching down in Paris, it's time for some serious parental intervention. And so, with a 96-hour window before Kim (Maggie Grace) disappears forever into a sordid underworld of Albanian sex traffickers, Bryan Mills - Liam Neeson, making a surprisingly good action hero - flies from the City of Angels to the City of Light to track his offspring.

His name is Besnik Bakalli, and as the Fort Dix terrorism trial enters its fifth week in federal court in Camden, he is waiting in the wings. Like Mahmoud Omar, who has been on the witness stand for nine days, Bakalli is a government informant who befriended the defendants and secretly recorded conversations for the FBI. And like Omar, a convicted felon who faced deportation and possible prosecution for bank fraud when he agreed to cooperate,...

Agron Abdullahu, one of the Fort Dix Six, scratched graffiti into the door of his jail cell that included an AK-47 assault rifle firing bullets at the letters "FBI," prosecutors charged yesterday. They said he also etched the name of a town in Kosovo, his homeland, along with an Albanian acronym for the Kosovo Liberation Army, which prosecutors called a paramilitary organization with a history of war crimes. "The subject matter of the etchings alone is disturbing at best, and at worst demonstrates the volition of an individual predisposed to violence," prosecutors wrote in a brief filed in federal court in Camden yesterday.

In a few months, a new 10-foot statue of Bill Clinton will take its place overlooking Bill Clinton Boulevard - in the city of Pristina, capital of the breakaway province of Kosovo. Remember Kosovo? For a few months, it captured our attention. Now, while the American public looks elsewhere, the province is again becoming a test case for how much say the international community will have within the borders of a sovereign nation. The surprising answer - in Kosovo as in Darfur, and perhaps elsewhere - is that this community can and must have a say. Kosovo may be the turning point that lays noninterventionism down to a quiet sleep.

The alleged plot involving six men born outside the United States but living here legally and otherwise is richly detailed in antiterrorist spy craft and less detailed about the plotters' motivation. Experts in Islam, national security, the Balkans and the Middle East were surprised by the makeup of the group, which consists of four ethnic Albanians born in the former Yugoslavia, one Turk and a U.S. citizen born in Jordan. "To me, there's this great irony that you've got Albanians who want to attack the U.S. military, based on whatever reasoning," said Robert A. Saunders, an expert on political Islam at the State University of New York in Farmingdale.

Blaga Stevic doesn't have a problem with his ethnic Albanian neighbors, and they don't have a problem with him. Stevic, a Serb who was born in Kosovo, fled with his family to Serbia after NATO went to war in 1999 on behalf of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority. He was afraid of revenge-minded extremists, he said, not the Albanian residents of his hilltop village of Stara Kolonija. So when the United Nations offered to restore his damaged home last year, he decided it was time to return.