Former Albania president dies

Ramiz Alia, the hand-picked successor of Albania’s late Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha and the man who presided over the Balkan country’s transition to multi-party democracy, died yesterday aged 85.

Alia climbed the communist hierarchy under Hoxha in isolationist Albania, then officially atheist and an enemy of both the East and West.

His party won the first multi-party elections in 1991 but he resigned as president in April 1992 after the opposition Democratic Party took power.