Five Serbs injured in attack in northern Kosovo

One of the men was hospitalized while others were sent home after receiving medical assistance. One of the patients, Milan Jovanovic, said that ethnic Albanians from the neighboring village of Miroce attacked them with sticks while they were picking apples in the area of his village at about half past noon today. The attending physician in the Kosovska Mitrovica hospital, Dr. Sasa Dimic, told Tanjug that five patients aged 36 to 42 years old were admitted to hospital with head and body contusions at about 2 p.m. today. “Four of them were taken care of in the surgical admissions ward and after the diagnosis, they were given first aid treatment and allowed to go home, and one patient was kept in the hospital for further diagnosis and monitoring of his health,” said Dimic. But none of the five injured men was in life danger, he added. Milan Jovanovic, who received minor injuries in the incident, told Tanjug that he and the others went to an orchard to pick some apples and were attacked by a group of ethnic Albanians who outnumbered them. He said the Albanians were from the neighboring village of Miroce, and they have been causing problems to the Serbs on daily basis ever since 1999, despite the fact that they have usurped Serb property. “The village of Miroce is wholly usurped. Nobody (of the Serbs there) is allowed to approach their own property, and now they are coming after our own” property, too, Jovanovic said. Gojbulja is a village in the north-eastern Kosovo municipality of Vucitrn with about 60 Serbian families in an Albanian-majority environment.