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Three ethnic Albanians were gunned down in southern Serbia, only days after police and a group of gunmen clashed near the boundary with neighboring Kosovo, Serbia’s Interior Ministry said on Wednesday.
The ministry said that Skender and Arburim Ajdini were killed late Tuesday in the town of Presevo, just outside neighbouring Macedonia. The suspected gunman is still at large, it said.
“We believe that the suspect has already fled to Kosovo but the reasons for the killings are not political but related with unsolved personal affairs,” a police official in Presevo said.
Meanwhile in the neighbouring town of Bujanovac another ethnic Albanian was killed in a broad daylight shootout, a police statement said. Police arrested a suspect and charged him with murder. “This killing also has nothing to do with politics,” the police official said.
The shootings have raised tensions in the region that is still recovering from a ethnic Albanian insurgency in 2001 that ended with a Western-brokered peace deal.
On Saturday a police detachment patrolling the border area near Bujanovac encountered an armed group, masked and dressed in black uniforms. According to police, the gunmen were attacking cars on a local road leading to Kosovo. One gunman was killed in a shootout while the rest of the group remained at large.
Southern Serbia’s Presevo Valley with its predominantly ethnic Albanian population borders the Albanian-majority province of Kosovo, which has been administered by the UN and protected by NATO peacekeeping force since the Atlantic alliance in 1999 drove out Serb forces, ending a two-year war with separatist guerrillas.
BIRN 2007
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