Leader of Serbian List implicated in Kosovo terrorist attack, Albanian PM nudges EU, US for action

A video showing the vice-leader of the Serbian List party in north Kosovo, Milan Radoicic, among the group of individuals who carried out a terrorist attack on Sunday has been published by Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla.

Serbian List is a Serb-majority party in Kosovo that previously held local and national government positions before resigning en masse at the end of 2022 and then refusing to participate in local elections earlier this year.

The election of Albanian mayors into their previously held posts and the subsequent entry of municipal premises by the new mayors triggered significant unrest led by local Serbs, resulting in the inuring of KFOR troops, journalists, police, and members of the public.

The video shows Radoicic seemingly leading the group of some 30 heavily armed men responsible for killing a Kosovo police officer before barricading themselves in a monastery and engaging in a shootout with police.

“The person you see in the video talking to the radio receiver is Radoicic. He is in charge of the group of terrorists, directing them. If you see it in the video, the moment they see the drone they leave”, Svecla told Euronews Albania.

Radoicic is a businessman and politician with a colourful past. In 2013, he was accused of aiding and abetting abuse of a public position related to a mining project. He was also accused of illegal gravel excavation but eventually acquitted in 2019.

He has also been accused of being linked to the assassination of Oliver Ivanovic, leader of the Freedom of Democracy and Justice Civic Initiative, in 2018. Vucic said that Radoicic is not related to the murder in any way.

In 2021, the US State Department of the Treasury put Radoicic on its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list over alleged links to organised crime and corruption.

Serbian President Aleksander Vucic in 2017 called Radoicic a “guardian of Kosovo and Metohija”.

Svecla said the plan was to attack to destabilise the north of Kosovo, and the ‘terrorists’ intended to travel further south to the river Iber and prevent the police from entering the entire north.

“There is talk of 200 people potentially recruited who would be part of this scenario. The plan was for them to go further south to the line of the Ibër river and through attacks to prevent the Kosovo police from acting freely and then declare some autonomy or something else”, said Sveçla.

The interior minister of Kosovo added that the action is continuing, and the Kosovo police have found other trucks and bulldozers with weapons.

“This is the logistics that a real army has. Armament numbers are increasing. We have discovered another blind car. There are trucks and bulldozers carrying ammunition. There are more launchers, more anti-tank mines, and more anti-personnel mines. This long list is being updated. This machine gun with nitroglycerin is not even in the possession of the police, this is military and comes directly from the warehouses of Serbia”, said Svecla.

Leader of the opposition party, the National Movement of Serbia, Miroslav Aleksic, blamed Vucic for the attack.”After the armed conflict in Banjska, where at least four people died, Vucic must resign. Radoicic could not have armed dozens of Serbs in the north without the knowledge and approval of Vucic and the Serbian security services.”

While Vucic has not commented publicly on the video and the comments of Svecla, he declared an official day of mourning for the four individuals killed during the subsequent shootout with Kosovo police.

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama reacted to the day of mourning, saying it was a bad signal from Belgrade and it should make its mind up if it wants to be with Europe and the democratic world or not.

“The officially declared mourning in Belgrade for the members of the armed group that were destroyed by the security forces of the Republic of Kosovo, after that group took the life of a police officer, is the worst signal that Serbia would give to the region and the Euro-Atlantic community,” he wrote on Twitter.

He said Belgrade should have opened investigations into the criminal group, but instead, they are “fanning the flames of an armed conflict like never before since 1999.”

“This is the moment that Serbia must clearly and firmly decide whether it will be with Europe and the democratic world of the 21st century or with the shadow of itself at the end of the 20th century, with the values and principles of the European Union and the Euro-Atlantic community or with the ghosts and crimes of its inglorious past of the 90s; with the European tomorrow of its innocent children or with the guilty yesterday of murderous and suicidal nationalism,” Rama wrote.

He also called on the EU and US to decide whether they will take more action or simply continue to follow the dialogue for normalisation, which he said is at its most dangerous stage.

(Alice Taylor | Euractiv.com)