Kosovo official deplores arrest of German agents

Dec 7, 2008, 15:12 GMT

Berlin - A Kosovo official has deplored, but refused to apologize for the arrest of three German intelligence agents in Pristina, a German newspaper reported Sunday.

Germany was infuriated by the November 19-28 detention of the men from its BND foreign intelligence service.

The newspaper Welt am Sonntag quoted Vlora Citaku, deputy foreign minister of Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February, as saying, 'It was a most unhappy incident.'

But she added, 'One cannot apologize for something that one is not to blame for.' If anybody had done the wrong thing, 'it was not our government's fault.'

The BND agents, who were stationed in Kosovo and posing as investment advisers, were accused by Kosovo authorities of being the people who had thrown a 300-gram bomb at a European Union office building in Pristina, the capital.

Citaku said she could not rule out that 'other players in the region' might have had an interest in disrupting Germany's relations with Kosovo through the incident.

'Neither the bomb nor the unhappy development that followed were in our interest,' she said.

After the three men were initially remanded in custody for 30 days, Kosovo released them when it was found there was no evidence against them, and they were flown home.

Germany has hotly denied it would have any reason to bomb a European Union office.

Other media said on Sunday Berlin was also angered that the highest levels of government were not alerted in time about the conflict.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and the magazine Focus said the BND agents informed their head office near Munich on November 14 that one of them had been stopped by police while photographing the bomb site.

The Kosovo police took the man's name. The BND chief, Ernst Uhrlau, was not told about this till five days later, when they were actually arrested, and the chancellor's office was not told till November 20.

Germany is the second biggest donor to the new ethnic Albanian republic after the United States.