Macedonia ministers, intelligence chief resign after shootout: official

Macedonia’s embattled prime minister removed his interior minister and his intelligence chief quit on Tuesday, in an apparent bid to save the government from a damaging surveillance scandal. The move also followed a weekend of bloodshed when police raided an ethnic Albanian suburb in the northern town of Kumanovo, triggering a day-long gunbattle in which 14 gunmen and eight police officers died. The state news agency MIA reported that conservative leader Nikola Gruevski had proposed to parliament the election of new interior and transport ministers, offering no explanation why. A second report then said intelligence chief Saso Mijalkov, Gruevski’s cousin, had resigned.

Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska, Transport Minister Mile Janakieski as well as the director of DBK Saso Mijalkov presented their resignations.

a government spokesman told AFP

Their removal comes just days before a planned mass rally led by opposition Social Democrat leader Zoran Zaev on May 17 to demand Gruevski’s resignation.  Zaev says he is in possession of a mountain of illegal wiretaps that he says Gruevski’s government recorded on an industrial scale. The tapes, drip-fed to the media since January and often involving Jankulovska and Mijalkov, appear to expose government control over journalists, judges and the conduct of elections.

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