Macedonian Interior Ministry

The president stressed that this happened before an international arrest warrant was issued for Gruevski in Skopje, who fled the country in order to avoid serving two years in jail because of alleged abuse of office related to buying an armored Mercedes car.

The Macedonian Interior Ministry issued the arrest warrant on the evening of Nov. 13.

After the Macedonian Interior Ministry said former prime minister Nikola Gruevski had fled to Hungary and was applying for political asylum there, an EU spokesperson told BIRN that Brussels was following events and hoped the case would not be politicised. 

The Macedonian Interior Ministry said the demonstrators - opposed to the deal reached by Athens and Skopje to end a dispute over the country's name - used pyrotechnics and tried to force their way into the Assembly, to which the police responded by using tear gas.

After three months in hiding, Greek police have arrested two former Macedonian secret policemen, Goran Grujevski and Nikola Boskoski, wanted in Macedonia for their alleged involvement in the country's illegal wiretapping scandal.

The two men were arrested in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, on Wednesday under a warrant issued by Macedonia.

An employee of an NLB Bank branch in Skopje has stolen 2.27 million euros from the bank's vault, the Macedonian Interior Ministry has confirmed.

According to the police, the 40-year-old suspect, B.S., put the cash in plastic bags and walked out of the building, without raising suspicion of either his colleagues or the security.

The deputy head of the Macedonian Police's urban crime fighting unit, "Alfa", Saso Milosevski, has been sacked after the authorities discovered his high-school diploma was fake.

"It is not true that my diploma is false. Why do you care about my diploma?" Milosevski briefly told BIRN.

Tensions rose on Monday as refugees and migrants who had been stranded for weeks at a camp inside Greece walked along the borderline and managed to cross over into the southern Macedonian village of Moin, where police and troops had been deployed in an attempt to stop them, media reported.

Macedonia has closed its border "completely" to illegal migrants after Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia announced tight new restrictions on migrant entry, a police official said on March 9.

Macedonia and Kosovo have established exchanges of information on verifying the identities of the victims and those who were arrested in Kumanovo last weekend during the Macedonian police action.

The Macedonian Interior Ministry has established that a number of those involved in the fighting were citizens of Kosovo.

"Worshipers block Islamic Community building"

SKOPJE -- A group of some 50 worshipers on Monday blocked the seat of the Islamic Community in Skopje, Macedonian and Albanian language media are reporting.

Previously, reports from the Macedonian capital said that a group of 50 armed persons had seized the building.