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BELGRADE: A man has been shot dead by Serbian police, the interior minister said Sunday, after being connected with the attacker behind a crossbow shooting at the Israeli embassy in Belgrade in June.
Interior minister Ivica Dacic said the man fired shots toward the police near the southern city of Novi Pazar late Saturday and refused to surrender.
“During the arrest, he resisted, fired three to four shots at the police, and members of the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit neutralized him,” Dacic told local media.
He added that the man had previously been convicted and jailed for terrorist offenses.
The police operation took place in the village of Hotkovo, near Novi Pazar — a historical and political center of Serbia’s Bosniak Muslim minority.
Police said the man was wanted in connection with another man killed by police in Belgrade on June 29th, after shooting a police officer in the neck with a crossbow outside the Israeli embassy.
The attack in the Serbian capital was characterised as a “terrorist act” by officials, who described the assailant as a Serbian convert to Islam.
The man killed Saturday night was the landlord of the June attacker, police said, who had lived in his apartment in Novi Pazar prior to his attack at the embassy.
He had been on the run since the June attack, the police minister stated.
Local media describe the man killed in Novi Pazar as a “well-known follower” of the Wahhabi movement — a purist form of Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia.
The interior ministry confirmed that he was arrested in 2007, and sentenced to 13.5 years in prison as part of a group that engaged in an armed conflict with police officers in the village of Trnava, near Novi Pazar.
At that time, 14 of his associates were also arrested.
They were charged with planning terrorist attacks in Belgrade and Novi Pazar.