Three UN judges ordered police on Friday to free three German agents who were arrested on suspicion of plotting a bomb attack at an EU building in Kosovo.
“There was not enough evidence to raise reasonable suspicion,” said Judge Vinod Boolell, who presided over the panel of international judges.
The order prompted prison officials to free the three German nationals on Friday evening. A photographer saw German Embassy cars collect two of them from the detention facility in Lipljan town southwest of Pristina. The third was released from a detention facility in the city.
The three — reportedly former soldiers working for Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service — were arrested last week and ordered held for 30 days for an investigation. The suspects had denied the charges against them, as did the German government.
Local prosecutors in Kosovo alleged that on Nov. 14 a German citizen threw 300g of dynamite at the EU offices in Pristina from a nearby building as the other two Germans looked on. The dynamite exploded, shattering windows but causing no injuries.
The prosecution said the attack was designed to “hamper and hinder” efforts to deploy the EU’s most ambitious police mission in Kosovo, but never explained what would have motivated German agents to do that.
This week the UN Security Council approved the deployment of an EU police and judicial mission throughout Kosovo under the UN flag.
Originally, the EU mission was to deploy after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17, but it was stalled in part because of objections from Serbia.
The EU office houses the bloc’s officials who monitor Kosovo’s compliance with an international plan that paved the way for Kosovo to declare independence.
The UN Security Council did not endorse the plan, prompting Serbia to ignore the declaration.
But more than 50 countries have recognized Kosovo’s independence based on the plan, which is to accommodate the demands of Kosovo’s Serb minority, which is wary of the ethnic Albanian leadership.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS