by tyler | Oct 13, 2023 | CNN, europe
A teacher was killed Friday and several people injured in a knife attack at a public school in Arras, northern France, according to CNN affiliate BFMTV.
A worker at the school is in critical condition after receiving several stab wounds and a second teacher was wounded less seriously, BFMTV reported.
The suspect has been put under investigation for terrorism, the French national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office announced Friday.
Following the attack in Arras, “the national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation for the following — murder in relation to a terrorist initiative; attempted murder in relation to a terrorist initiative; association of terrorist wrongdoer in preparation for crimes against people,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
According to BFMTV, the suspect is a 20-year-old man of Chechen origin whom French authorities previously announced was under “active surveillance” ahead of the incident.
The attack occurred at the Gambetta High School around 11 a.m. local time (5 a.m. ET) Friday, BFMTV said.
According to a post on X from French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the attacker was detained by police.
According to BFMTV, the suspect cried “Allahu Akbar” during the attack. His brother was also reportedly detained.
On Friday afternoon, French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to the public school where the incident occurred, and said the attack shows “the barbarism of Islamist terrorism.”
“Nearly three years after Samuel Paty was murdered, terrorism attacked a school again, in a context that we all know,” he said, referring to the killing of a high school teacher in a Paris suburb in October 2020.
Macron expressed his condolences to the family of the teacher killed, adding that their bravery “saved many people.”
The Arras Prosecutor will host a press conference in the “coming hours,” according to Macron.
French police have posted on X asking people to avoid the area and to avoid spreading misinformation online about the incident.
by tyler | Oct 9, 2023 | CNN, europe
Dozens of people are believed to have been captured in Israel by Hamas fighters over the weekend. They are now being held in locations across Gaza, complicating Israel’s response to the militant group’s deadly attack on Saturday.
Israel is taking pains to establish the exact number of hostages that have been taken into Gaza, an isolated coastal enclave of almost 2 million people crammed into 140 square miles, one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, the Israeli military’s international spokesperson, told CNN on Sunday that “dozens” had been captured and emphasized just how complex the situation was as the army launched airstrikes on Gaza in retaliation. In an earlier briefing he had said “civilians, children and grandmothers” were among those being held captive.
In addition to Israeli captives, there are several other nationalities believed to be taken hostage.
Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, has warned that Israeli attacks in the area could pose a threat to hostages, with its spokesman, Abu Obaida, saying in a recorded audio message Saturday that they were “present in all axes in the Gaza Strip.”
In an interview with Arabic news outlet al-Ghad TV, Mousa Abu Marzouk, chief deputy of Hamas’ political bureau, said the number of Israeli hostages “hasn’t been counted yet but they are over a hundred,” and claimed that “high-ranking” Israeli army officers were among them.
Another Palestinian armed group, Islamic Jihad, on Sunday said it is holding at least 30 hostages in Gaza.
CNN is unable to verify the claims of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that “it is unprecedented in our history that we have so many Israeli nationals in the hands of a terrorist organization.”
It has been more than 17 years since an Israeli soldier was taken as a prisoner of war in an assault on Israeli territory. And Israel has not seen this kind of infiltration of military bases, towns and kibbutzim since town-by-town fighting in the 1948 war of independence.
In 2006, militants seized an Israeli sodier, Gilad Shalit, who was 19 at the time, from the Israeli side of the Gaza border fence. Hamas held Shalit for five years before he was exchanged for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.
Until now, the group was also known to be holding two Israeli civilians who had crossed the border into Gaza and were captured, as well as the remains of two Israeli soldiers.
Here’s what we know about some of the hostages taken by Hamas since the miliant group began its attack.
Hundreds of attendees at the Nova music festival ran across the plains of the Negev Desert near Urim, a community close to the Gaza Strip, trying to escape Hamas gunmen pursuing them in vehicles in a terrifying chase. Some were killed and others were seized by armed captors, social media videos showed.
Details of hostages from the attack are beginning to emerge as family members recognize relatives in the clips circulating online.
In one video that went viral, an Israeli woman and her boyfriend – identified as Noa Argamani and Avinatan Or – were shown being kidnapped. In it, Argamani was hoisted onto the back of a motorcycle and driven away as Or was apprehended and made to walk with his hands behind his back. CNN could not independently verify the video.
“It’s very difficult when you see someone that is so close to you and you know so much being treated like this,” Amir Moadi, a roommate of Noa Argamani, told CNN, adding that he knew about five or six people who had been at the festival and have since gone missing.
In another video authenticated by CNN, an unconscious woman who was at the festival could be seen being displayed by armed militants in Gaza as onlookers shouted “Allahu Akbar.”
CNN later confirmed the identity of the woman as German-Israeli national Shani Louk.
Ricarda Louk, Shani’s mother, told CNN that she last spoke to her daughter after hearing rockets and alarms sounding in southern Israel, calling to see if she’d made it to a secure location. Shani told her mother she was at the festival with few places to hide.
“She was going to her car and they had military people standing by the cars and were shooting so people couldn’t reach their cars, even to go away. And that’s when they took her,” Ricarda told CNN, adding that she hopes to see her daughter again, but the situation is bleak.
“It looks very bad, but I still have hope. I hope that they don’t take bodies for negotiations. I hope that she’s still alive somewhere. We don’t have anything else to hope for, so I try to believe,” she said.
Hamas fighters took hostages in the border community Be’eri, and the town of Ofakim, 20 miles east of Gaza, IDF spokesman Brig. Gen. Daniel Hagari said on Saturday, adding that the two locations were the “main focal points” of the unfolding crisis.
In a televised address, he said that there were special forces with senior commanders in the two communities, and fighting was ongoing in 22 locations.
One video, geolocated by CNN to Be’eri, appears to show Hamas militants taking multiple Israelis captive.
Residents in Be’eri and another community on Israel’s border with Gaza, Nir Oz, told the country’s Channel 12 television station that assailants were going door to door, trying to break into their homes.
Channel 12 also reported that infiltrators had taken hostages in Netiv HaAsara. Israeli authorities did not immediately confirm any details about those reports.
One Israeli mother told CNN she had been on the phone with her children, aged 16 and 12, who were home alone when they heard gunshots outside and people trying to enter. Then, over the phone, she heard the door break down.
“I heard terrorists speaking in Arabic to my teenagers. And the youngest saying to them ‘I’m too young to go,’” the mother said. “And the phone went off, the line went off. That was the last time I heard from them.” CNN is not identifying the mother and her children for safety reasons.
Another Israeli father told CNN he suspects his wife and young daughters may have been abducted while visiting Nir Oz. He said he recognized his wife in a viral video that shows a group of people being loaded on the back of a truck flanked by Hamas militants, while chants of “Allahu Akbar” ring out.
“I don’t even know what the situation is regarding the hostages, and the situation is not looking good,” Yoni Asher said, adding that he tracked his wife’s phone and learned that it was located in Gaza.
In another video, geolocated by CNN to Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood, a barefoot woman is pulled from the trunk of a Jeep by a gunman and then forced into the backseat of the car. Her face is bleeding, and her wrists appear to be cable-tied behind her back. The jeep also appears to have an IDF license plate, suggesting it may have been stolen and brought into Gaza.
Al Qassam Brigades claimed to capture “dozens” of Israeli soldiers on Saturday.
“We bring good news to our (Palestinian) prisoners and our people that the al Qassam Brigades have dozens of captured (Israeli) officers and soldiers in their hands,” the group’s spokesman Abu Obaida said in a post on Telegram. “They have been secured in safe places and resistance tunnels.”
Video geolocated and authenticated by CNN shows at least one Israeli soldier being taken prisoner.
The video, posted to Hamas’ official social media accounts, shows militants yank two clearly terrified and stunned soldiers out of a disabled tank. It’s unclear from the video how the tank was disabled, but Hamas has used drones to drop bombs onto Israeli tanks before.
One of the soldiers is then seen in a short snippet of video being kicked on the ground by the militants. In the next clip, the soldier is seen lying motionless on the ground.
The second soldier is seen being led away by Hamas militants. A third soldier – his face very bloody – is seen lying on the ground motionless near the tank track. CNN does not know the current whereabouts or status of the three soldiers.
A second video, taken afterward, shows a number of different armed men around the tank. The three soldiers are nowhere to be seen.
The armed men are then seen pulling a fourth Israeli soldier from the tank. The soldier is motionless as he’s dragged down the side of the tank and onto the ground. The armed men are seen stomping on his body.
The attack has impacted families around the world, with a growing list of foreign nationals kidnapped.
Two Mexican nationals, three Brazilians, a Nepali student and a British citizen are among those missing.
Two Mexican nationals, a woman and a man, have “presumably” been taken hostage by Hamas, Mexico’s Foreign Minister Alicia Barcena said on Sunday.
The Brazilians and 26-year-old British citizen Jake Marlowe were all at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border which was attacked on Saturday.
Marlowe, who was working there as a security guard, has been missing since Saturday morning, his mother told the Israeli Embassy in the UK.
A source at the German Foreign Ministry told CNN late Sunday that it “has to assume” there are German citizens amongst those kidnapped by Hamas. “As far as we know, they are all people who have Israeli citizenship in addition to German citizenship,” the source said, but would not comment on individual cases.
Eleven Thai nationals have been taken hostage, a spokesperson for Thailand’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
Israel has long been a major destination for Thai migrants, most of whom work agricultural jobs. There are approximately 30,000 Thai workers in Israel, according to the Foreign Ministry, and over a thousand have requested help to be evacuated.
by tyler | Oct 4, 2023 | CNN, europe
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak got up to speak from a podium bearing the words “Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future” – the slogan for this year’s Conservative Party conference. But over the past three days on the fringes of the governing party’s annual meeting, members have been planning their own long-term future – and in some cases for one that doesn’t involve him.
This year’s gathering, in Manchester, a historic city that was formerly the industrial powerhouse of northern England, held extra significance as it is likely the last to take place before the next general election. It was a golden opportunity for Sunak to unite his party after the battering his party’s credibility took from his two immediate predecessors – the scandal-hit era of Boris Johnson and the economic tumult of Liz Truss.
However, despite the fact Sunak – who has been in office for less than a year – has exceeded expectations by steadying the ship and restoring some calm to British politics, many members of his own party members spent this week settling old scores and resigning themselves to defeat.
As one senior Conservative told CNN on the night before Sunak’s keynote speech: “He has done the near impossible and given us some hope of staying in power. For some reason, they don’t seem to want to let him.”
Sunak is seeking a historic fifth successive term for the Conservative Party, which has been in power since 2010 – first in coalition and from 2015 alone.
Those 13 years have been some of the most consequential in modern British politics. From Brexit to the Covid-19 pandemic, Johnson’s transgressions and Truss’s turmoil, Sunak inherited an unpopular mess of a party that, according to opinion polls, looks doomed.
Nevertheless, Sunak and his team are optimistic that they can pull the party together before the next election, which must take place by January 2025. And their strategy for achieving this aim appears to involve shifting further to the right, with policies and rhetoric that are tailor-made for Conservative members rather than the broader public.
One of the clearest signs this week that Sunak feels the need to appeal to the right-wing of his base was the presence at the conference of Nigel Farage, one of Britain’s most famous Brexiteers and perma-scourge of the Conservatives.
It was Farage, as then-leader of the Euroskeptic UK Independence Party, who drove the political narrative that eventually forced the Conservatives to hold a referendum on leaving the European Union in 2016. While the party establishment loathes Farage, Conservative members greeted him with open arms and requests for selfies after he arrived on Monday afternoon. In many ways, he was the star of the show here in Manchester.
It’s instructive, then, to see Sunak’s strategy through that lens.
Last week, the PM announced a controversial U-turn on green policies, including a delay on a plan to boost the number of electric cars on Britain’s roads. He has criticized the opposition Labour Party for endorsing lower speed limits for drivers. Many of his Cabinet ministers have hinted at the prospect of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which they regard as hindering efforts to curb immigration to the UK, particularly by refugees.
The health minister said transgender patients could be banned from hospital wards that corresponded to their lived gender. Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch railed against trans rights activists, repeating an attack line that Labour MPs don’t “know what a woman is.”
And in his closing speech, Sunak scrapped an expensive, high-speed rail project in the north of England, which he claimed would save taxpayers £36 billion – which, he said, would be reinvested instead in “hundreds of new transport projects” in the North and Midlands, both rail and road.
The optics of this were curious, as the scrapped project, known as HS2, would have provided Manchester, the conference’s host city, with faster links to London and the wider region with better rail capacity and connections.
Asked if they believed making the announcement in Manchester was a PR own goal, a Sunak ally told CNN: “The brutal truth is we are not going to win in Manchester anyway, so it doesn’t matter if we piss them off.”
Most of this is broadly attractive to Conservative members and it would be reasonable to assume that it would give them a reason to rally behind Sunak.
But there was not much sign of unity this week. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Conservative Party has always been a broad church, with competing factions jostling for supremacy. But these factions appear more splintered than ever.
Walking around the conference centre, it was striking to see groups of Conservatives who in various ways represented every iteration of the party since 2010. And quite a lot of those factions sincerely dislike one another and have serious disdain for each other’s vision for the future of the party.
The most high-profile rebellion came from Sunak’s immediate predecessor, Truss, who spoke at a rally at the same time as Jeremy Hunt, Sunak’s finance minister, gave his conference speech on the main stage.
Truss, along with others on the libertarian right, called for a complete rethink of the tax system and size of the state. Her speech was made almost a year to the day that her own tax-cutting plans caused markets to crash and sank the pound to its worst low ever against the dollar.
You might assume that less than 12 months since her disastrous premiership came to an end, the public might not be that interested in Truss’s thoughts. But Conservative Party members are rather different to the general public. In stark contrast to Hunt’s speech taking place on the main stage, Truss’s rally – held in a side room of a hotel next to the main conference center – was standing-room only.
But other factions within the party believe the true Conservative talisman to be another former PM: Boris Johnson.
Superficially, the Johnsonites are on the same wing of the party as Truss and her acolytes. However, the most passionate of his supporters are the so-called “red wall” voters: People typically from the north of England from poorer backgrounds who supported Brexit and, in many cases, voted Conservative for the first time because of Johnson. (The red-wall name is derived from the color most associated with the opposition Labour Party, which historically held sway in these areas.)
Many members of this group find Truss’s talk of tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses offensive and out-of-touch at a time the UK is suffering a cost-of-living crisis. A senior member of a local government in one of these areas told CNN: “How could anyone expect me to go and tell people that we should cut taxes and cut money for local government? It’s ridiculous.”
Unfortunately for Sunak, many of these members didn’t have a much better view of him. While broadly they supported lots of his recent announcements – they simply don’t believe he is serious about them.
“He’s out-of-touch. He is a liberal. He won’t do it properly,” said one of the red-wall members.
On the opposite wing of the party, the moderates are uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric they are hearing from cabinet ministers and the prime minister on issues like migration and LGBT+ rights – especially Suella Braverman, the home secretary, whose hardline stance worries even some on the right of the Conservative Party – including within the cabinet.
The most optimistic group of Conservatives currently are those within Sunak’s orbit. This group sincerely believes that, despite the polls, Sunak stands a very decent chance of remaining prime minister after the next election. There is some merit to this view: since Sunak’s green U-turn he has seen an improvement in his poll numbers and his personal approval ratings are better than those of anyone else in his party, according to the pollster YouGov.
Many highly respected political operatives have returned to the party to work on the election campaign and, as one of them told CNN: “I wouldn’t have given up my well-paid job if I thought we were going to lose.”
The frustration for Sunak’s allies is that despite their optimism, so many of the party’s other factions have already decided that the next election is lost, and are digging into their respective trenches before the post-election blame game starts.
A government source told CNN: “It will be a tragedy if we lose because these people for whatever reason cannot get over themselves and get behind Rishi. We really can win this thing but we need them to come with us. Labour just are not that good.”
Adding to the sense of inevitable loss was the open and obvious debate about the future of the party beyond Sunak. Events like the one Truss attended were, in the eyes of many members, the starting gun for a battle over the party’s soul once in opposition.
Indeed, many of the frontrunners to succeed Sunak should he lose – including members of his own cabinet – spoke at an unusually high number of cosy, “in-conversation” style events with friendly hosts, playing for the applause of party members in the audience.
Despite all of this, Sunak could reasonably call this year’s conference a success, if you compare it to other conferences in recent years. He has improved the party’s prospects since taking office and there wasn’t the same sense of doom that lingered over last year’s meeting.
It’s more that this is a party that feels tired, confused and is at times acting desperately with its hotchpotch of red-meat policies and populist rhetoric. It might not be fair and it might not even be accurate, but the general sense of deflation was more potent than that of optimism.
by tyler | Oct 3, 2023 | CNN, europe
The 2023 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to a team of scientists who created a ground-breaking technique using lasers to understand the extremely rapid movements of electrons, which were previously thought impossible to follow.
Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy,” the Nobel committee said when the prize was announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.
It praised the laureates for giving “humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.”
The movements of electrons inside atoms and molecules are so rapid that they are measured in attoseconds – an almost incomprehensibly short unit of time. “An attosecond is to one second as one second is to the age of the universe,” the committee explained.
“They were able to, in a sense, provide an illumination tool that allows us to watch the assembly of molecules: how things come together to make a molecule,” Bob Rosner, president of the American Physical Society and a professor at the University of Chicago, told CNN.
These movements “happen so quickly that normally we have no idea how they actually occur or what the sequence of events is,” said Rosner. But the laureates’ work means scientists can now observe how these movements happen, he added.
The three winners used precision lasers to generate ultra-short bursts of light. L’Huillier, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, discovered a new effect from a laser light’s interaction with atoms in a gas. Agostini, a professor at Ohio State University, and Krausz, a professor at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, then demonstrated that this effect can be used to create shorter pulses of light than were previously possible.
L’Huillier, who is only the fifth woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics since the accolades were established in 1901, said she was teaching a class when she got the call from Stockholm this morning, only picking up the phone on the third or fourth time.
“The last half hour of my lecture was a bit difficult to do,” L’Huillier told Hans Ellegren, secretary general of Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, during the announcement news conference.
Together, the trio’s experiments with lasers have allowed them to “capture the shortest of moments,” the committee said.
Just as the naked human eye cannot discern the individual beats of a hummingbird’s wing, until this breakthrough scientists were not able to observe or measure the individual movements of an electron, the committee explained. Rapid movements blur together, making extremely short events impossible to observe.
“The faster the event, the faster the picture needs to be taken if it is to capture the instant,” the committee said. “The same principle applies to trying to take a snapshot of the movements of electrons.”
When asked about the potential applications of her research, L’Huillier said the first use is “to really understand when we look at electrons, and look at their properties.”
“The second one is much more practical and it’s coming. This radiation that we produce is also useful for the semiconductor industry as an imaging tool. So this is also coming with a practical application,” L’Huillier said.
Related: The problem with Nobel’s rule of three
Everything in the world – gases, solids, liquids – is made up of atoms, which contain a nucleus with electrons spinning around it. Olle Eriksson, a professor of theoretical magnetism at Uppsala University in Sweden and a member of the committee that awarded this year’s physics prize, compared the atom to flies hovering around a sugar cube.
“On the attasecond timescale, it is as if time stood still, everything is exactly fixed, except the electrons, and so the only thing you’ll see is the movement of those flies (electrons), not the sugar cubes themselves. This allows us to study the electrons and nothing else and the electrons are the ones that are responsible for all chemical binding,” he explained.
The technique does not allow scientist to directly see electrons but works a little like a strobe light to image something that moves rapidly, allowing scientists to measure different attributes of the subatomic particles, which carry an electric charge.
Michael Moloney, the chief executive of the American Institute of Physics said that the discovery has “opened up a whole new window on our universe.”
“You can send a pulse into the material, a very, very short pulse and pulse after pulse. And that allows you to see then how the (electron’s) charge is moving around between molecules and within molecules and really understand the foundations of all chemical and physical reactions.”
“This is another transformative moment in physics and in science, where a whole new (way) to probe the universe was opened up by the work of these three physicists,” Moloney added.
by tyler | Oct 2, 2023 | CNN, europe
The French government has vowed action to “reassure and protect” the public as its capital Paris reports a “widespread” rise in bedbugs.
French Transport Minister Clement Beaune has said he would convene a meeting this week to “undertake further action” to “reassure and protect” the public from the reported surge in the numbers of the blood-sucking insect.
French transport operators remain “vigilant” about bedbugs following reports of what was said to be sightings in public transport but say there have been no sightings in recent days.
RATP, the operator behind the Parisian metro, said it is “extremely vigilant on the matter” but there had been no recent sightings.
The company told CNN on Monday that “each sighting is taken into account and is subject to a treatment,” adding that “these last few days, there have been no proven cases of bedbugs recorded in our equipment.”
RATP said a report was made on Wednesday last week but after an assessment “no presence of bedbugs was recorded on the train.”
Railway company SNCF – which operates many trains in the country including the Eurostar – told CNN that it “takes reports of pests very seriously” but that “to date we have not observed any presence or proven reports of bedbugs.”
There have been recent calls for government action from Paris officials and trade unions mount after several videos of bedbugs spotted in public transport and other locations such as cinemas have surfaced on social media.
Speaking to French TV station LCI on Friday, deputy mayor of Paris Emmanuel Gregoire called the phenomenon “widespread.”
“You have to understand that in reality no one is safe, obviously there are risk factors but in reality, you can catch bedbugs anywhere and bring them home,” he said.
Three years ago, the French government launched an anti-bedbug campaign, which includes a dedicated website and an information hotline, as numbers of the insect surged.
But Gregoire said that despite that plan, “there are 3.6 million people who come into Paris every day, and bedbugs do not stop on the outskirts of the city.”
An expert from France’s national health and sanitary body, Anses, said the problem was “an emerging phenomenon in France and almost everywhere in the world.”
“It’s mainly due to the movement of people, populations traveling, the fact that people stay in short-term accommodation and bring back bedbugs in their suitcases or luggage,” Johanna Fite from the Anses department of risk assessment told CNN.
She added there was an “escalation” in numbers because bedbugs were increasingly resistant to insecticides.
“We are observing more and more bedbug populations which are resistant, so there is no miracle treatment to get rid of them,” Fite said.
However, the Paris deputy mayor warned against “hysteria” over the issue, noting there had been an “increase in Parisians who are referring to the town hall’s information services for information on bedbugs”.
“Professional companies which intervene in residential areas are telling us that currently the proportion of interventions for bedbugs is atypical compared to normal and is increasing rapidly,” he said.
The news comes as Paris gets ready to host the 2024 Olympics Games, but officials say they are not worried.
“There is no threat to the Olympic Games,” Gregoire said.
“Bedbugs existed before and they will exist afterward,” he added, saying the games were an “opportunity” for everybody to work together on the issue.
by tyler | Oct 2, 2023 | CNN, europe
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said on Monday that Washington’s reports last week warning of a big build-up of Serbian troops on the Kosovo border “were not fully accurate.”
Speaking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview, Vučić said: “We always appreciated all the reports that were coming from NSC (the National Security Council), (the) White House, and all the other institutions that are coming from the United States. But the real issue is that these reports were not fully accurate.”
The White House said last week that it was concerned, warning of an “unprecedented” build up of advanced Serbian artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry units near the Kosovo frontier and calling for an “immediate de-escalation.”
“A year ago, we used to have 14,000 people at the administrative line with Kosovo. Few days ago, we used to have less than 8,400. Today we have 4,400, which is a regular number of people,” Vučić said.
“We always hear, and we always listened when our partners were asking us to de-escalate a situation and we did it this time, although there were no reasons for a big worry, because we didn’t need any kind of wars, any kind of clashes with NATO,” he added.
When asked why the Serbian government moved more troops to the border, Vučić said that Serbia’s army “follow the situation in the field, and they move our forces in a way that they believe it can be… the most useful and they have their own operations and everything else but I did not sign even a high alert for our army people.”
The long fractious ties between Serbia and neighboring Kosovo flared in late September, when 30 armed men opened fire on a Kosovar police patrol in the village of Banjska, in northern Kosovo, before barricading themselves inside an Orthodox monastery. The ensuing hourslong shootout left one Kosovar police officer and three gunmen dead.
Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani pointed the finger at Belgrade for inciting the violence.
A top Kosovo Serb politician, Milan Radoicic said this weekend that he took part in the gun battle, Reuters reported.
In a letter sent to Reuters by his lawyer, Radoicic, who is wanted in Kosovo and lives in neighboring Serbia, said he “personally prepared logistics for the defense of Serb people” and received no help from the Serb authorities. Radoicic is under US sanctions for suspected links to organized crime.
When asked if Radoicic will face accountability that the European Union is demanding, the Serbian president said: “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,” but said that the issue started from the Serbs wanting to “protect themselves.”
“I’m not going to defend a killing of an Albanian police guy and I didn’t do it. I condemned that. But I’m saying that Serbs were arresting with no charges, home searches, evictions, expropriations, everything that was not in accordance with a Brussels agreement,” he added.
The clash was one of the worst since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after a NATO bombing campaign drove out Serbian forces responsible for a brutal crackdown against ethnic Albanians, from Kosovo, leading to the end of the 1998-99 war.
More than 20 years on since the war, a fragile peace has been preserved in Kosovo, while Serbia continues to view it as a breakaway state and does not recognize its independence. Kosovo’s Serbs view themselves as part of Serbia, and see Belgrade as their capital, rather than Pristina.
The confrontation comes months after ethnic Serbs attacked dozens of NATO peacekeepers in the town of Zvecan, in northern Kosovo, in May. The clashes broke out after Serbian demonstrators tried to block newly elected ethnically Albanian mayors from taking office, following a disputed election in April.
Western leaders were quick to condemn the violent actions, urging both parties to de-escalate tensions. The violence has ratcheted tensions in the Balkan region as the EU and US mediators attempt to finalize yearslong talks to normalize ties between Serbia and Kosovo.
When asked about his thoughts on the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic leaving a political message on a TV camera lens at the French Open in May in response to violent clashes in Kosovo, the president said he believes Djokovic was expressing his feelings “from the bottom of his heart” but stressed that Serbian politicians need to be “pragmatic” about the situation.
Following his first-round victory against American Aleksandar Kovacevic, Djokovic wrote “Kosovo is the [heart] of Serbia. Stop the violence” in Serbian on a camera lens, using a heart symbol.
“I believe that Novak Djokovic was saying something from the bottom of his heart. 99% of people Serbian believe in that but I can tell you one thing, that we politicians need to be pragmatic, rational, which means that we need to find solutions through negotiating process, through constructive approach,” the Serbian leader said.
