Hawzah News Agency- (Albania) After 25 years of inertia over unofficial places of worship, the Agency for the Legalization, Urbanization and Integration of Informal Areas, ALUIZNI, has started to deliver the first property certificates for mosques that were not legally registered in Albania.

According to the director of ALUIZNI, Artan Lame, by March this year some 957 sites all over the country were awaiting legalization, most of them mosques.

The mosques were built without permission on state land in the 1990s, and did not formally belong to anybody. However, by Albanian law, the KMSH must be the owner of all mosques.

The head of the Islamic community in Tirana, Ylli Gurra, said that KMSH was enthusiastic about the process and was willing to pay the agency the cost of the land for the legalized properties.

Gurra emphasized that while they are satisfied about the government agency will's to legalize the mosques; they want the process to go faster in order to tackle the problems that mosques with unsettled property issues bring.

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