A powerful explosion damaged a water canal and temporarily cut water and power supplies to Kosovo’s cities, the prime minister said on Saturday, blaming groups supported by Serbia. At least eight people were arrested.
Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti said the blast on Friday in Vrage, 60km north of the capital, Pristina, disrupted the supply of water to some cities and major power plants. It followed two other explosions in previous days on buildings of a police station and local authorities in the same area in the north of the country, mostly populated by the ethnic Serb minority.
About 15 to 20kg of explosives were used to damage the critical infrastructure, Kosovar police chief Gazmend Hoxha said.
Photo: REUTERS
Kurti blamed “official Belgrade and its criminal structures led by Milan Radoicic, supported by Serb institutions and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.”
Radoicic, a politician and wealthy businessman with ties to Serbia’s ruling party and Vucic, was among 45 people charged in Kosovo in connection with a gunfight last year in which a Kosovar police officer was killed following an incursion by heavily armed Serb gunmen.
Only three Serbs have been arrested and the others are at large, including Radoicic, who Pristina said is protected by Belgrade.
Kosovar police have detained eight people suspected of being part of the attack, Kosovar Minister of Internal Affairs Xhelal Svecla said.
A big cache of weaponry, ammunition, military and police uniforms, cash and other items were confiscated at 10 locations in the north.
Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs Marko Duric condemned Friday’s explosion, but also criticized Kurti’s “ethnonationalist regime” rushing “to point fingers at Belgrade without evidence.”
Kosovar President Vjosa Osmani, who canceled a trip to Brunei because of the incidents, met with diplomatic representatives of Western powers and the EU to express her concern that such “attacks aim not only at destabilizing Kosovo, but also represent a serious threat to the stability of the whole region.”
Kosovo-Serbia relations remain tense despite efforts by the international community to normalize them.
Brussels and Washington are urging both sides to implement agreements that Vucic and Kurti reached in February and March last year.
They include a commitment by Kosovo to establish an Association of the Serb Majority Municipalities. Serbia is also expected to deliver on the de facto recognition of Kosovo, which Belgrade still considers its province.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS