Macedonia Claims Kosovo Albanians Attacked Border Post

Macedonian police on Tuesday said a group of 40 armed and masked gunmen wearing the markings of an Albanian paramilitary unit, the National Liberation Army, NLA, stormed a police outpost near Kosovo at 2.30 am Tuesday.

Police Spokesperson Ivo Kotevski told a press conference in Skopje that a "terrorist attack" had taken place.

The spokesman said the attackers, who appeared to be from Kosovo, spoke Albanian and took four policemen who were manning the border post hostage. 

They then tied three of them up and beat them while filming the whole thing on camera.

"The leader of the group, speaking in Albanian... told the captured police officers the following: 'We are from the NLA and tell everyone that nobody can save you, neither [Prime Minister] Nikola Gruevski, nor [head of the junior ruling Albanian DUI party] Ali Ahmeti. We want our own state".

According to Kotevski, the police officers were told that they risked being executed.

After the hostage takers left, the spokesperson said that the fourth officer, who was not tied up, helped the four captives to escape on foot. While departing the scene, the officers heard shots from automatic weapon.

Police said they were taking measure to clear up the attack but no more information was available owing to the complexity of the situation.

The scene of the reported attack, the village of Goshince, part of the ethnic Albanian rural municipality of Lipkovo, is some 25 kilometres northeast from the capital of Skopje towards the border with Kosovo.

The region was on the frontline of armed hostilities during a short armed conflict in Macedonia in 2001.

The secretary general of Lipkovo municipality, Nexhadi Osmani, told BIRN that they had not...