SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A gunman stormed into a police station in a northeastern Bosnian town shouting “Allahu akbar” on Monday, killing a policeman and wounding two others, authorities said.
The gunman was also killed during the attack in the town of Zvornik, police spokeswoman Aleksandra Simojlovic told The Associated Press. “Allahu Akbar” is the Arabic phrase for “God is great.”
The Bosnian Serb police chief, Dragan Lukac, identified the man as Nerdin Ibric.
Zvornik is a town in the Bosnian Serb part of the country and it is located on the border with Serbia. Before the 1992-95 war, about 60 percent of the town’s population was Muslim Bosnians. Almost all were expelled and many were killed during the war as part of a Serb campaign to create a purely Serb area.
Serbs managed to control half of Bosnia by the time the U.S. brokered a peace agreement in 1995 under which each warring party could keep their conquered territory. This is how the country ended up divided into two fairly autonomous regions — one for the Serbs, the other shared by Muslim Bosniaks and Croats.