Police in Belgrade have arrested a Kosovo Serb politician four days after he admitted being part of a paramilitary group involved in a gunfight with Kosovan security forces which left four people dead.
The clash threatened to ignite a wider eruption of violence, after thousands of Serbian troops were deployed to the Kosovo border. They were withdrawn only after the threat of sanctions from the US.
Belgrade has denied any links to the 30-strong paramilitary unit, but pictures had surfaced in the Kosovan press showing Milan Radoičić, the deputy leader of the main Kosovo Serb party, walking around freely in Serbia despite his admission he had taken part in an ambush on Kosovo police on 24 September.
In a statement on Tuesday, the Serbian interior ministry said they had detained Radoičić for up to 48 hours, and searched his flat.
“He was brought to the higher public prosecutor’s office in Belgrade with a criminal complaint,” the statement said.
The Kosovan government has insisted that Serbia was behind the armed Kosovo Serb group which ambushed a police patrol last month in the village of Banjska in northern Kosovo, killing one policeman, and then involved in a gunfight, in which three Serb gunmen were killed, before taking refuge in Banjska’s monastery.
Pristina has pointed to the extensive range of modern, Serbian-made weapons the group was carrying, and produced a document to show that at least one of the weapons had been supplied by the Serbian army. The aim, Kosovan officials said, was to trigger an incident that would serve as a pretext for Serbian forces to intervene, to “protect” ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo.
“The aim of this aggression was occupying northern Kosova and imposing a partition, which is a goal that Serbia’s government officials have continuously worked for, openly and in secret, for years,” the foreign minister Donika Gërvalla-Schwarz, said in a statement. “While we were engaging in Brussels in what is termed to be a normalisation dialogue, Serbia has been preparing for an invasion of our country.”
The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić, was asked on CNN on Monday whether his government would take legal action against the those responsible for the ambush.
“Of course, Serbia will held accountable all the people that committed criminal deeds and that we might find on our territory … prosecutors will do their job,” Vučić said, but that the clash was the result of Serbs wanting to “protect themselves”.
The Serbian president said four thousand Serbian troops have been pulled back from the border since US warnings of consequences for escalation, leaving a garrison of 4,400. Pristina is also calling for 48 small police and army bases strung along the frontier to be “demilitarilised”. The Nato peacekeeping force, Kfor, has been reinforced with a British battalion since the Banjska clash and the Serbian troop buildup.
Vučić and the Serbian president, Vjosa Osmani, will attend a summit in Granada of 51 European leaders on Thursday and sources say there are efforts to get them into the same room despite political hostility between the two countries.
Radoičić’s lawyer, Goran Petronijević, could not be immediately reached for comment. On Sunday, he had said he was hoping the prosecutor’s office would not launch proceedings against his client as there were no legal grounds for prosecution.