Macedonia lifts immunity of six MPs in parliament attack probe

Macedonian deputies voted Friday to lift the immunity of six opposition MPs to allow their prosecution over an April attack on parliament, in which scores of people were injured.

Around 100 nationalist demonstrators, including masked men, stormed the assembly in Skopje on April 27 over the vote for a new parliamentary speaker, instigating bloody riots that made news around the world.

Public prosecutors said this week that they had ordered an investigation into 36 people suspected of "terrorist endangerment of the constitutional order and security".

So far 22 people have been put in custody or under house arrest, but the six suspected MPs, from the conservative opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, could not be detained unless their immunity was lifted.

VMRO-DPMNE deputies boycotted Friday's session and said the decision was "not based on arguments and facts".

April's attack followed a long-running political crisis in the small Balkan country, which the European Union stepped in to mediate.

Then opposition leader and current Prime Minister Zoran Zaev bleeds after being beaten in the April attack

Stringer, AFP/File

Following a corruption and wiretapping scandal, VMRO-DPMNE leader Nikola Gruevski stepped down in January 2016 -- after a decade in power -- as the country prepared for an early election, which was held in December last year.

The vote had no clear outcome until Social Democrat leader Zoran Zaev struck a coalition deal with minority ethnic Albanian parties. Ethnic Albanians make up around a quarter of Macedonia's two million people.

But this deal was opposed by nationalist supporters of VMRO-DPMNE, who began holding nightly protests, saying that plans to boost the status of the Albanian language threatened national unity.

The attack on parliament, which met with international condemnation, erupted over the election of an ethnic Albanian speaker. The protesters alleged the vote was illegal.

Zaev, who was beaten in the rioting, became prime minister in May.

In October, nationalist Pance Angelov was sentenced to four years in prison for violently pulling the hair of Social Democrat MP Radmila Sekerinska during the attack. She has since become defence minister.

In May, nine Macedonians received suspended prison sentences for their part in the violence.

The Social Democrats accused their rivals of fanning ethnic tensions in a bid to return to power.

Macedonia aspires to join both the EU and NATO.