FYROM’s former rebels deny having ties to slain gunmen

Western officials remain skeptical of accepting police version of shootout

A Slav-Macedonian special police officer enters an armored personnel carrier parked beside the US Embassy in Skopje on Saturday, the day of a mysterious police shootout.

SKOPJE (Reuters) - Former ethnic Albanian rebels in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) yesterday denied allegations that they had links with seven suspected gunmen killed in a police shootout on Saturday.

«This is simply false,» said Gezim Ostreni, a former general of the guerrilla National Liberation Army (NLA) that led last year's six-month insurgency. «The NLA is in no way connected to this incident.»

Police said that the dead men, killed in a suburb of the capital Skopje, were suspected to be «mujahedin,» foreign fighters from Muslim countries planning attacks on government officials and foreign embassies.

The police also said that they had found uniforms bearing ethnic-Albanian rebel insignia on the scene, which they claimed showed they had been working with the former rebels.

«This is absolutely not true,» Ostreni said.

«The NLA did not conduct a religious war in Macedonia. On the contrary, the fight and the demands of the Albanians were about freedoms and human rights.»

The origins of the dead men remain a mystery, as police have not yet identified the bodies or their nationalities. But police say they are certain they were foreigners and believe that perhaps two came from Pakistan.

FYROM's government has said «mujahedin» fighters were involved in last year's insurgency, which Ostreni also denied.

He added that the NLA ceased to exist on September 27 of last year, when its fighters handed in arms to a NATO-led peacekeeping force in return for greater civil rights promised in a Western-brokered peace deal that ended fighting in August.

Western officials in FYROM say they are skeptical of nationalist propaganda and cautious about accepting the police version of Saturday's events.

«There are some questions that should be answered. Firstly, we don't know why those people were there and what they were doing, but we hope that a full investigation will clear things up,» a senior NATO official in FYROM said.

He added that international monitors in the country had not been allowed to see the bodies and that the only information they had regarding the shootout was from the Interior Ministry.