Gunmen Take Police Hostage in Macedonia, Call for Albanian State

Macedonian police said on Tuesday about 40 armed men wearing uniforms of a disbanded ethnic Albanian guerrilla army from Kosovo took several police officers hostage in northern Macedonia overnight. A Macedonian Interior Ministry official told a news conference that the gunmen said they were part of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army. The incident was reminiscent of an insurgency in Macedonia in 2001, when security forces fought rebels demanding greater rights for the former Yugoslav republic's large ethnic Albanian minority. Macedonia was promised integration with NATO and the European Union but progress has been blocked by a dispute with Greece over Macedonia's name, which it shares with a northern Greek province.