Serbia forces detain 3 Kosovo police officers, accusations of illegal border crossing
Three Kosovo police officers were detained by Serbian forces on Wednesday but officials from Kosovo and Serbia gave different locations for the arrest, accusing each other of crossing the border illegally.
Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti demanded the release of the three officers. He said they had been arrested 300 meters inside Kosovan territory, near the border with Serbia.
For all the latest headlines follow, our Google News channel online or via the app.
“The entry of Serbian forces into the territory of Kosovo is aggression and aimed at escalation and destabilization,” Kurti wrote on his Facebook page.
But Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic said the three were arrested “as far as 1.8 kilometers (1 mile)” inside Serbian territory near the village of Gnjilica. He also accused Kurti of inciting conflicts.
“We are at the crossroads whether we will have peace or not ... and there’s one man in the Balkans who wants to incite conflicts at any cost and that is Albin Kurti,” Vucic said in a live TV broadcast.
He rejected Kurti’s accusation that the Serbian police entered Kosovo, saying: “They did not even set a foot there.”
Vucic said Belgrade was willing to submit all the evidence and accept an international inquiry into the arrests and that it could relocate some of its military currently stationed around five km (3.1 miles) away from the boundary to garrisons inside Serbia to defuse tensions.
“It will be difficult to return to normalcy,” he said.
Kosovo banned all vehicles with Serbia’s license plates from entering its territory in response to the arrests, an interior ministry official told Reuters at mid-evening on Wednesday.
The detentions may further fuel tensions in the predominantly Serb northern part in Kosovo which borders Serbia and which has seen violence in recent weeks.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, nearly a decade after an uprising by the 90 percent ethnic Albanian majority against repressive Serbian rule.
In 1999, a NATO bombing campaign drove Serbian security forces out of Kosovo but Belgrade continues to regard it as a southern province.
Violence flared last month when 30 peacekeepers and 52 Serbs were injured in clashes in four predominantly Serb municipalities in northern Kosovo just outside Serbia.
It erupted after Serbs rallied against ethnic Albanian mayors who moved into their offices following a local vote in which turnout was just 3.5 percent. Serbs in the area boycotted the election.
Read more:
US official urges Kosovo, Serbia to deescalate tensions or jeopardize EU aspirations
Turkey forces arrive in Kosovo to bolster NATO-led peacekeepers amid latest violence
US Secretary of State Blinken urges ‘immediate de-escalation’ by Serbia, Kosovo
