An organisation entitled 'The Army for Liberation of Occupied Albanian Countries' which has so far been unknown to the public threatened on Tuesday to attack the Macedonian army and the police unless they retreat from, as they said, 'occupied Albanian countries' within the next two weeks.

A release posted on the Albanian-language internet portal Potalb which was quoted by all Albanian media claims that the so-called 'army' in Mitrovica, Kosovo-Metohija, held a meeting of its general staff from which it sent such an ultimatum to the Macedonian government.

The text was released in a time of rising tensions in Macedonia after the murder of five Albanian citizens near Skopje. The investigation into the assassination is still underway and Skopje-based media do not exclude the possibility that the crime was ethnically motivated.

The release notes that Albanians' rights are daily violated in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The pro-Serbian government headed by Nikola Gruevski is spreading anti-Albanian ideology and staging assaults on innocent Albanians, Albanian villages are blocked by Macedonian Slavs and nobody among corrupted politicians in the ethnic Albania is reacting because they are all traitors of their homelands, the text states.