Sat, May 26 2012

Rioting breaks out on Serbia-Kosovo border

Tue, Feb 19 2008 20:03 CET

bySpasena Baramova

823 Views
Rioting breaks out on Serbia-Kosovo border

Furious with Kosovo proclaiming its independence, Serbs attacked and set fire to two check points at the new Kosovo border, forcing local police to call upon NATO's KFOR peacekeepers for help.

According to a Reuters source it was only a matter of time before NATO closed down the bridges separating Mitrovica into a Serbian and an Albanian part.

"The border check point at Gate 1 in Jarinje is destroyed. There are no people hurt," a Kosovo police spokesperson said.

According to Reuters, Serbs also attacked a check point near Zubin Potok. The police officers hid in a tunnel while about 1000 protesters tried to tear it down.

"We asked NATO to send a helicopter to evacuate our officers," a police source told Reuters.

Just 30km away from Mitrovica, hundreds of Serbs set fire to the temporary passport control premises in Banja. "We cannot allow that institutions of a non-existent state be imposed upon us and that we be made pay taxes to some independent Kosovo. This is impossible," Slaviša Ristić, one of the local Serb leaders told Associated Press, as reported by Dnevnik daily. 

KFOR's contingent in the region consists of 17 000 French, Danish, Belgian and Americans troops. The incidents showed it would be very hard for EU's Kosovo mission (EU-LEX), was due to deploy this week, to carry out its tasks with only 2000 police officers and law experts on its team.

  • Print
  • Send via email
  • Translate to
  • Share:

To post comments, please, Login or Register.


Please read the The Sofia Echo forum comments policy.

More in this category

Saab awarded $2.4M military training equipment contract in Bulgaria

The funding is provided under the foreign military sales programme of the US army's Program Executive Office of Simulation, Training and Instrumentation.

Two Brits fined for hooliganism in Bulgaria’s Veliko Turnovo

The UK nationals were arrested after throwing beer bottles at people after being refused entry to a restaurant that had closed for the night.

Tourism: Bulgaria to spend 300M leva on restoring castles, ancient sites

Restoration and development projects include Madara Horseman, Arbanassi fortress, Magura cave.

Sovereign Order of Malta assists hospital in Bulgaria’s Iskrets

Simeon Saxe-Coburg and his spouse Margarita opened a new heating and insulation system at the Tsar Ferdinand Hospital for Pulmonary Diseases in Iskrets, a project implemented thanks to the Embassy of the Sovereign Order of Malta in Sofia and the Nando Peretti Foundation.

Bulgarian Parliament passes confiscation act

According to the law's provisions, the commission will have the power to investigate individuals without prior notification and would not require a criminal conviction in order to launch an investigation.

© 2000-2012, Sofia Echo Media Ltd.

Web Design by RIZN

Sofia Echo Media is part of the Economedia Group.
The news and information content on this website is provided by our editorial team and is copyrighted. Any unauthorised reproduction or use of it is strictly forbidden. Reproduction of this website's content is permitted only with prior written permission from the Editor-in-Chief, should be propertly acredited and provide an active link back to our site. Comments posted by the website's visitors are independent of the editorial materials and do not represent the views of sofiaecho.com. Sofia Echo Media cannot be held responsible for the statements contained in visitor comments. The percentаge change in the shares' prices are based on the price of the last transaction of the current session compared to the price of the last transaction of the previous session. Bulgarian Stock Exchange data is not real-time, but updated every 15 minutes, and should not be used as a basis for decisions about buying or selling stock options.