Gunmen in armoured vehicles have stormed a village in Kosovo, battling police and barricading themselves in a Serbian Orthodox monastery.
Kosovo police said one officer and three of about 30 attackers were killed in shootouts around the village of Banjska on Sunday. Monks and pilgrims were locked in the monastery’s temple, the church said, as the siege raged for hours.
Ethnic Albanians form more than 90 percent of the population in Kosovo, a former province of Serbia, but Serbs are the majority in the north and there were clashes in May that injured dozens of protesters and NATO alliance peacekeepers.
The Serbs have never accepted Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence and still see Belgrade as their capital more than two decades after the Kosovo Albanian uprising against Serbian rule.
It was not immediately clear who was behind Sunday’s violence, but Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla blamed “Serbia-sponsored criminals”.
The Serbian Orthodox Church’s diocese of Raska-Prizren, which includes Banjska, said men in an armoured vehicle stormed the monastery compound, forcing monks and visiting faithful to lock themselves inside the temple.
Credit: aljazeera.com
