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Macedonia arrests 20 murder suspects

01 May 2012 23:25 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Macedonian police on Tuesday arrested 20 people suspected of murdering five men last month near a lake close to the capital Skopje, interior ministry said, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

Interior Minister Gordana Jankulovska told reporters that the arrested were radical Islamists who were detained in a police operation called "Monster" on Tuesday morning in several villages around Skopje.

About 26 locations were searched in the operation, and a large amount of weapons, as well as some Islamists’ literature, were seized.

"The arrested are radical Islamists and some of them had fought on the Taliban side in Afghanistan and Pakistan against NATO troops. They will be charged on terrorism," Jankulovska said, adding that the motives of the murders were to spread fear among the public.

She also said that most of the arrested were Macedonian citizens, but interior ministry didn’t reveal the names of the arrested or specify their ethnicity.

Five men have been found shot to death near a lake in the north of Macedonian capital of Skopje late on April 12. Four of the victims were around 20 years old, and the fifth was in his 40s.

The murder that happened two days before Orthodox Christian Easter shocked the tiny Balkan country and stirred up worries of possible inter-ethnic conflict.

Although the police haven’t identified the ethnicity of the murderers, it was widely rumored that they were ethnic Albanians, who accounts for about a quarter of the 2.1 million population in Macedonia.