Fighting between police forces and members of an armed group has continued for a second day in the northern Macedonian town of Kumanovo.
Five police officers were killed and over 30 injured in an exchange of fire with the armed group in the town on Saturday.
Early Sunday, ambulances in Kumanovo were seen carrying more wounded policemen.
Interior minister Gordana Jankulovska told reporters late Saturday that over 20 members of the armed group had surrendered, but that others refused to give up arms and were holed up in houses in Diva Naselba, a neighbourhood in western Kumanovo.
There are reports the armed group was made up of about 70 members.
Jankulovska said the “terrorist group,” which had entered Macedonia from an unspecified neighbouring country, planned plan to “use the current political situation to perform attacks on state institutions.”
She said some of the attackers had been killed, without specifying the number. She was not able immediately able to confirm whether there were any civilian casualties.
People leave the scene of a police standoff against members of an armed group in the northern Macedonian town of Kumanovo. (Boris Grdanoski/Associated Press)
Saturday’s clashes come as Macedonia is grappling with its deepest political crisis since its independence from former Yugoslavia in 1991. The government and the opposition have accused each other of planning to destabilize the country to take or preserve power, and some analysts fear leaders on both sides are ready to provoke ethnic clashes as leverage.
Kumanovo is an ethnically mixed town located about 40 kilometres northeast of the capital Skopje, near the border with Kosovo and Serbia. The region was the center of hostilities between ethnic Albanian rebels and government forces during the ethnic conflict in 2001.
Ethnic Albanians, who make up a quarter of Macedonia’s 2 million people, took up arms in 2001 demanding more rights. The conflict ended after six months with a western-brokered peace deal that granted more rights to the minority group.
