Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti says Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic planned and ordered an attack in northern Kosovo “to destabilize” the country with the goal of starting a war.
About 30 heavily armed Serbs stormed the village of Banjska last Sunday, fought Kosovo police in a gun battle, and barricaded themselves into a Serbian Orthodox monastery. A Kosovo policeman and three Serb attackers were killed.
Hours later, police retook the monastery, where they found a large cache of weapons and ammunition. Six wounded members of the armed group were hospitalized in southern Serbia, according to Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla, while other attackers fled.
Kurti told Al Jazeera that Serb “paramilitary formations” in Banjska had equipment manufactured in Serbia that cannot be found on the open market.
While information is still being gathered by prosecutors and Kosovo police, “what we know is that we’ve confiscated five million euros [$5.3m] worth of ammunition and weapons, and it was all manufactured in factories in Serbia,” Kurti alleged.
“Hand grenades, machine guns—everything that we confiscated was produced in Serbia and cannot be found on the market. It’s obvious the army of Serbia gave this to the paramilitary formations.”
Kurti said the ultimate goal of Sunday’s attack was for Serbia to stage a scenario and raise tensions.
“They wanted our police to enter the Banjska monastery so they could then share photos worldwide [showing] bullets on the monastery’s walls. That didn’t happen because our police are very strong and very professional, and [the attackers] escaped.”
