Song dedicated to Osama on YouTube

Skopje, Aug 19 (IANS/AKI) A group of ethnic Albanian Muslims in Macedonia have uploaded a song praising terrorist Osama Bin Laden on the popular video sharing website YouTube.

“Allah is great. You fled from your hometown and swore to Jihad. You spent your life in the mountains and all you had you sacrificed to Allah”, says the song. The singer and songwriter are unknown, according to Macedonia’s news agency INA.

The song is rumoured to have been performed in mosques after it was distributed among an ethnic Albanian Muslim forum in Macedonia. It is thought to have been performed in several mosques in Skopje, the Macedonian capital.

One in four of Macedonia’s two million people are ethnic Albanians, who are Muslims.

Muslims in Macedonia have criticised the song, and claim they had nothing to do with it. They disputed that the song had been performed in any of the country’s mosques.

Radical Wahabi Muslims have in recent years increasingly resorted to violence in a bid to impose their fundamentalist version of Islam in several Balkan countries, most notably in Bosnia.

Macedonian officials have not yet confirmed the presence of radical Wahabi groups in the country.

Last month, police detained three Islamists with suspected Wahabi links after they allegedly assaulted an imam at a Skopje mosque, threw him out of the mosque and replaced him with a radical imam to lead prayers.

Wahabis are suspected of bombing a police station in the Bosnian town of Bugojno in June, killing one police officer and injuring six others.

Wahabi fundamentalists have been distributing leaflets in mosques of Bosnia, urging Muslims not to join the country’s police and army, rattling the country’s moderate imams and other Muslims.

–IANS/AKI