Nikolic: Incident was intended to destabilise whole region

BELGRADE - Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic has condemned the incident at the Serbia-Albania football match on Tuesday and demanded that the security services, the police and customs services treat the event as the final warning, because the next such case could result in human casualties.

The obvious intention of those who organised and put in action the plan involving a drone with a flag of Greater Albania was to cause riots in Serbia and try to destabilise the entire region, he believes.

"Sporting events are not the place for provocative political messages," he stressed, adding that the incident was a promotion of an unscrupulous and impossible idea of Greater Albania, which was to cause a strong reaction at the stadium and throughout Serbia.

According to the president's press service, Serbia has done everything to put the past behind it and develop friendly relations. and the upcoming visit by Albania's Prime Minister Edi Rama is expected ti be a signal for establishing excellent relations.

"After the assassination of the efforts to establish a friendship between Serbia and Albania, it is obvious that Albania will need decades, if not centuries, to become a normal country, without hatred against the Serbia, said Nikolic, who expects Albania's top officials and public to condemn the Tuesday incident.

The drone lacked only an explosive device to give the impression of being linked to terrorist number one in the world, and it is particularly disturbing that extremists have sprayed graffiti on the monastery Visoki Decani and that hundreds of Kosovo Albanians are participating in terrorist activities in Iraq and Syria, he noted.

Photo Tanjug, S. Radovanovic (archive)