Four killed as police in Macedonia stop truckload of arms

MACEDONIAN POLICE shot dead four gunmen yesterday near the border with Kosovo amid a crackdown on arms smuggling and rising ethnic tension in Macedonia.

The men were killed in a shoot-out after a police unit tried to stop their truck near the village of Radusa, in a mountainous, mostly ethnic-Albanian area largely off-limits to Macedonian forces since the country almost descended into civil war in 2001.

“We set an ambush and . . . people from inside the vehicle opened fire. The police responded, and four of them were killed,” said Macedonian police spokesman Ivo Kotevski.

Two from Macedonia and one from Kosovo were all ethnic Albanians. The identity of the fourth man had not so far been established.

Mr Kotevski said police found weapons and explosives in the truck, as well as insignia of the National Liberation Army (NLA), which battled Macedonian forces in 2001.

Some of its fighters and weapons came from the Kosovo Liberation Army, which fought for independence from Serbia in a brutal 1998-1999 war.

The NLA was officially disbanded and disarmed in late 2001 under a western-brokered peace deal that ended the fighting in Macedonia and gave more rights to ethnic Albanians, who comprise one-third of the country’s population of two million.

EU and US officials have warned Macedonia the deal is in danger because of nationalist rhetoric from politicians on both sides, and many ethnic Albanians complain the government has failed to fully implement the 2001 pact.

Thousands of ethnic Albanians marched through the Macedonian capital, Skopje, this week to demand greater rights and to protest against alleged discrimination, with warnings from inside and outside the community it was becoming increasingly isolated from the country’s Slav majority.

Earlier this month, the NLA claimed to have killed a Macedonian soldier in another shoot-out in the border area near Kosovo, where police have discovered several arms caches recently.