Four Kosovo police officers arrested over Serb's shooting

(ANSA-AFP) - PRISTINA, 12 APR - Kosovo police arrested four officers late Tuesday over a shooting incident in which an ethnic Serb was wounded in the country's volatile north, a minister said. The incident on Monday night reflects soaring tensions between Pristina and ethnic Serbs less than a month after arch-foes Kosovo and Serbia stopped short of signing a deal on normalising ties. Ethnic Albanian-majority Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. Serbia, however, does not recognise this, and encourages Kosovo's 120,000 ethnic Serbs to defy Pristina's authority -- especially in the north where they make up the majority. Milan Jovanovic said he was shot while driving next to a Kosovo police checkpoint on a road near the flashpoint city of Mitrovica.Jovanovic, who underwent surgery in a Mitrovica hospital, told Serbian state-run RTS television that he heard a shot and felt a pain in his shoulder just after passing the checkpoint.

In a Facebook post late Tuesday, Kosovo Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla said: "Four police officers were arrested and remanded in 48-hour custody." The officers were suspected of not reporting the incident, and one was suspected of being involved in it, Svecla added. The initial results of an investigation suggested that the driver had failed to obey an officer's signal to stop his car, after which the officer opened fire, injuring the driver, the minister said. He identified the victim only by the initials M.J. (ANSA-AFP).

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