BELGRADE - Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Sunday slammed a so-called “hybrid attack” targeting Belgrade after a blast hit infrastructure in Kosovo, as he rejected accusations by the Pristina government that Serbia was responsible for the explosion. The incident “was an attempt at a hybrid, large and ferocious attack on our country that took place,” Vucic said during an address to the nation. “We have no connection with it,” Vucic added.
The president, however, stopped short of directly accusing an individual or state for orchestrating the blast, but said that Serbian authorities had launched their own separate investigation into the incident. The explosion late Friday near the town of Zubin Potok, which sits in an ethnic Serb-dominated area in Kosovo’s troubled north, damaged a canal that supplies water to hundreds of thousands of people and cooling systems at two coal-fired power plants that generate most of Kosovo’s electricity. The incident has sent tensions soaring between the two arch rivals, as both sides unleashed a war of words and trading allegations. Following the blast, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti immediately accused Serbia of masterminding the attack, calling the incident a “terrorist attack”. Animosity between ethnic Albanian-majority Kosovo and Serbia has persisted since the end of the war between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents in the late 1990s. Kosovo declared independence in 2008, a move that Serbia has refused to acknowledge. Kurti’s government has for months sought to dismantle a parallel system of social services and political offices backed by Belgrade to serve Kosovo’s Serbs. Friday’s incident came after a series of violent incidents in northern Kosovo, including the hurling of hand grenades at a municipal building and a police station earlier this week. Kosovo is due to hold parliamentary elections on February 9.