SKOPJE, Oct 27: The Albanian National Army (ANA), a shadowy organisation which says it is fighting for a Greater Albania in the strife-torn southern Balkans, has claimed responsibility for an attack on a police station in a northern Macedonian village.

The October 22 explosion damaged empty buildings housing municipal offices and the police station in Tearce just hours after ethnically mixed police units were redeployed there and in four other northern villages in a pilot plan worked out with the international community. There were no casualties.

Skopje hopes the largely symbolic redeployment will mark the first phase of an operation to re-establish government control over an area seized by ethnic Albanian guerrillas earlier this year prior to an August 13 Western-brokered peace accord.

Armed elements of the ANA “staged a guerrilla action against the police station” in Tearce, the group said in a statement released on its Internet site and signed by the “commander in chief” of the organisation, “Colonel Hekuran Aslani”.

The statement said the redeployment “of a so-called mixed police in regions with a majority Albanian population is not only unacceptable for the ANA, but it is considered also as an occupation of Albanian territory.”

The group reiterated its opposition to the peace accord, under which ethnic Albanian rebels of the National Liberation Army (NLA) agreed to disband and hand in almost 4,000 weapons to NATO troops last month.

It condemned the leaders of Macedonia’s ethnic Albanian parties and the political chief of the NLA, Ali Ahmeti, as “traitors” who had “lied to the Albanian public.”—AFP