Beqir Balluku Beqir Balluku ( February 14 , 1917 – November 5 , 1974 ) was an Albanian politician , military leader , and Minister of Defense of Albania . Balluku assisted Enver Hoxha in carrying out the 1956 purge in the Communist Party of Albania . However , in 1974 , Balluku himself , along with a group of other government members , was accused by Hoxha of an attempted coup d ' état against the Albanian Communist Government . He was executed that same year . Biography . Balluku was born on February 14 , 1917 in Tirana , Albania . He studied at a technical high school in Tirana . While he was doing his military service , he joined the ranks of the Albanian resistance against the Axis in the Antifascist war ( 1942 – 1944 ) . On May 20 , 1943 , he was appointed commander of the Communist partisan battalion " Krujë Ishëm " , and on September 18 , 1943 , he was named commissary of the third brigade . Later he was appointed commander of the second brigade . On January 28 , 1948 Balluku was named Chief of the Head Command of the Albanian Army . In 1948 , in the first Congress of the Party of Labour of Albania ( later the Communist Party of Albania ) , he was elected as a member of the Politburo , where he remained until his arrest , and in 1952 he was named Minister of Defense . One year later he gained the military rank of Lieutenant General . From 1948 – 1974 he was a member of the Albanian parliament . In 1953 he graduated from the General Staff Academy ( Russia ) ( former Marshal Voroshilov Military Academy of the USSR Army General Staff ) . Earlier , in December 1952 the Yugoslav State radio of Belgrade and the newspaper Politika had announced that he had been killed and his family interned , but it turned out that it was just a speculation : he had been busy with his studies in Moscow . In 1956 Balluku was presiding over the municipality of Tirana Conference of the Communist Party when the opponents of the Enver Hoxha - Mehmet Shehu regime nearly overthrew the government . Balluku informed Nexhmije Hoxha ( Hoxha ' s wife ) , that Enver Hoxha should return from the holidays and keep the situation under control . Shehu and Balluku ' s intervention helped cause the 1956 purge of the Albanian Communist Party . After Hoxha returned to Tirana , he first tried to be conciliatory towards his critics and then he retaliated by ordering the arrest of all of those who had spoken up . The troika Hoxha - Shehu - Balluku was so described by Nikita Khrushchev , then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union : The Albanians are worse than beasts – they are monsters . Only later did we learn how the Albanian Communist leaders punished and eliminated members of their own Party . They had a sort of troika : Hoxha , Shehu and Balluku . These three used to bring someone to trial , and Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu would sentence the accused to death themselves , without ever putting anything in writing ; then they would look for an opportunity to have their victim murdered secretly , and Balluku would personally carry out the execution . It was all very similar to the system used by Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria . In 1960 , following the Albanian Sino - Soviet stand , Balluku , as a representative of the Albanian Party of Labour , took a strong pro - Chinese and anti - Soviet stand in his speech at the Congress of the North Vietnam . Coup d ' état accusation , arrest , and execution . In July 1974 , after 22 uninterrupted years of continuous service as the Minister of Defense of the Socialist People ' s Republic of Albania , Balluku himself was accused by Enver Hoxha as the instigator of revisionist ideas and was sent to a military trial , where he was accused of a military coup d ' état and high treason against his own country . Balluku was sentenced to death along with Petrit Dume , Hito Çako and Rrahman Perrllaku . Political analysts and scholars seem to agree that Hoxha was aware of the military establishment ' s desire to decrease the Party ' s influence in the areas of the military and the economy . Their attempt to downgrade Hoxha ' s concept of the " people ' s war " was rewarded when Hoxha deposed the entire top level of the military establishment , including then the Minister of Defense , Balluku . Hoxha seems to have feared a putsch . Balluku was then ranked as the fourth member of the ruling Communist Party ( after Hoxha , Shehu and Hysni Kapo ) In the October 6 , 1974 elections for the People ' s Assembly , Balluku was the only leading Albanian politician not reelected ( in his home district of Shkodër ) . The removal of Balluku from the Albanian Politburo had already been disclosed in a report from Belgrade on September 11 , 1974 . Twelve days later , John A . Volpe , then US Ambassador to Rome , Italy , reported through a telegram sent to Washington that it was possible that Balluku and other high Defense functionaries had been removed from their posts . The first indication was a discrepancy between Hoxha ' s and Balluku ' s opinions on the defense system of Albania ; the second was a request from Beijing to Hoxha that he remove Balluku , who was making too many requests on weapons imports from People ' s Republic of China . The third possibility was the coup d ' état intent of Balluku , possibly endorsed by the other pro - Soviet Union Defense high functionaries . Balluku was executed by a firing squad on November 5 , 1974 . Balluku ' s remains were retrieved only 26 years later , on 18 July 2000 , on request of his family members . He had been put in a secret common grave in Vranisht , Vlorë County , together with the other two former Albanian generals ( Dume and Çako ) who had also been accused by Hoxha in 1974 . In 1979 , following the ideological split of the Party of Labour of Albania from the Communist Party of China , Enver Hoxha wrote in his memories that the " enemy groups " of Abdyl Këllezi ( Minister of the Economy ) and Beqir Balluku ( Minister of Defense ) , had drafted their inimical plan based on suggestions from Zhou Enlai , then Premier of the People ' s Republic of China .