Members of the armed group that surrendered after clashes with Macedonian police in Kumanovo over the weekend have admitted they had been involved in an earlier attack on a police station in the village of Gosince, Macedonian news agency MIA reported on Tuesday.

Quoting an Interior Ministry statement, MIA said members of the armed group also pointed to places where they had hidden the weapons seized from the police station they had occupied for several hours.

Acccording to the statement, police searched two locations in the village of Brest, close to the border with Kosovo, that were mentioned by members of the armed group and found 61 assault rifles, three heavy machine guns and eight cases of ammunition. Nearly all of the assault rifles were identified as having been stolen from the Gosince police station during the attack, MIA said.

Eight police officers and 14 gunmen were killed in the weekend clashes in Kumanovo, in northern Macedonia. Macedonia said on Sunday five Kosovars, members of the now dismantled Kosovo Liberation Army, led the armed group.

Some 40 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo briefly took over a police station in the Macedonian village of Gosince near the border in April, demanding the creation of an Albanian state within Macedonia. Ethnic Albanians constitute about a quarter of Macedonia’s population of some two million.

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