GNJILANE – The investigative unit of the Kosovo Police Service (KPS) initiated comprehensive investigation after an explosive device was thrown last night into the courtyard of Slobodan Todorović in the Cernica village, the Gnjilane municipality.

Regional KPS spokesman Ismet Hasani told Tanjug that nobody was injured in the incident which occurred last night after 9:00 PM, but some material damage was caused on the auxiliary facility.

The police spent the night on the spot, and today the police investigative unit initiated comprehensive investigation. ‘The motive behind this attack is unknown, and so far there are no suspects’, Hasani said.

Milorad Todorović and his family returned to the house of his father Slobodan the previous week (from Donja Budriga).

Milorad Todorović is a member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party of Serbia and was a member of the Serbian negotiation team during the talks on the Kosovo status in Vienna. He told Tanjug that the bomb was a massage to him and to other returnees willing to go back to their homes and property.

He said that it was disgraceful for the Kosovo authorities that these incidents are happening ten years after the conflict ended in the province.

Todorović stressed that the representatives of provisional institutions in Priština advocate return entirely declaratively and as a lip-service.

Todorović’s house is located in Donja Mahala in Cernica, the village with 38 Serb houses, but with no more than one or two still living in only five of them. Some 100 Serbs and 3,000 Albanians live in the village.

The previous attack on the Todorović’s family house occurred in 2006, one day after Milorad Todorović was appointed a member of the Serbian negotiations team in Kosovo talks between Belgrade and Priština in Austria.

In Cernica, several years after the conflict in Kosovo and Metohija ended, seven Serbs were killed and dozens wounded.

State Secretary in the Ministry for Kosovo and Metohija Zvonimir Stević told Tanjug that the latest attacks on Serbs in Cernica and Suvi Lukavac in Metohija, where the house of Ruža Ratković was torched, can hardly be called isolated incidents.

‘The common denominator for both incidents is terrorism, and ethnically motivated terrorism at that, with the fundamental aim to intimidate the returnees and force them to definitely give up sustainable return, as well as force the remaining Serbs, fearing for their families, to leave Kosovo and Metohija and join the army of over 200,000 Serb refugees and displaced persons’, Stević said.

He warned that this terror against the Serbs has persistent for over a decade, and that the perpetrators, as a rule, escape punishment or receive unacceptably low sentences, which in turn stimulates even more violent terror against the Serbian population and contributes to total ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and Metohija.

Stević pointed out that international community should also be held accountable for this situation in the province.