2 Men Held in Attack on Serb Opposition Leader

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  Police in Montenegro said Friday that they arrested two men who had shot and wounded a leading opponent of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic the night before in an apparent spread of Serbia’s lethal politics to its more peaceful sister republic.

The tantalizing announcement on Montenegrin Television’s evening news said the police “know who ordered this crime” but did not yet want to tell the public.

Serbian opposition leader Vuk Draskovic, hit twice in the head but not seriously hurt in Thursday night’s shooting at his coastal summer residence, said he had no doubt that Milosevic and his Serbian security police were responsible.

But the Serbian and Montenegrin capitals were rife with rival speculation that more radical elements of the regime or even adversaries within Serbia’s bitterly divided opposition movement could have been gunning for the 53-year-old politician.

Any convincing explanation of the crime by Montenegrin investigators is likely to affect the hidden but increasingly bloody struggle for power in Serbia, the dominant of the two republics in the Yugoslav federation.

Since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drove Milosevic’s troops from Serbia’s independence-minded province of Kosovo a year ago, Serbia has been shaken by the slayings of his defense minister, the head of Yugoslav Airlines and eight other prominent businessmen, politicians and underworld figures.

All but one of those killings remain unsolved, leading politically attentive Serbs to suspect that many were carried out to punish onetime allies who had somehow betrayed Milosevic and his powerful wife in their struggle to hold on to power.

But officials in Montenegro, who at the same time have defied Milosevic’s authority and aligned themselves with the West, say they are eager to prosecute this week’s shooting. Montenegro has its own 20,000-member police force, which does not answer to authorities in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia.

Draskovic was alone watching a televised soccer game in his dining room, police said, when two men with automatic rifles fired seven bullets through a plate-glass window from about 7 feet away, putting a hole in his left ear and grazing his right temple.

“I literally danced away from the bullets,” the politician said in a telephone interview Friday. He recalled taking refuge behind a column and crawling out his door to call police from a neighbor’s.

“It’s a miracle I was not wounded more seriously,” he added.

After the 11:45 p.m. attack, police quickly surrounded the ground-floor apartment in the Adriatic coastal town of Budva and set up six checkpoints on the 37-mile road inland to Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica.

Vuk Boskovic, an assistant to Montenegro’s interior minister, announced on Friday’s newscast: “Police are in possession of the weapons used in the attack and are holding the persons who carried it out, together with those who assisted them.”

Boskovic said the assailants, who were not identified, had followed Draskovic from Serbia to Montenegro early this week.

Western and Russian leaders joined in condemning the attack, while the victim, his face bandaged after treatment at a local hospital, received visitors at his apartment amid shattered glass, bloodstains on the floor and bullet holes in a wall. He was under Montenegrin police protection.

Draskovic had been without his four bodyguards since May 31, when Serbian authorities withdrew the men’s permits to carry weapons and had them arrested. Draskovic said Montenegrin police had promised to protect him at his summer residence but had not been around this week.

“It’s clear that Milosevic and his secret service will attack me again,” Draskovic said.

Last October, he survived what he called a highway assassination attempt when a cement-laden truck killed four companions in his convoy.

“They will attack a lot of others in Serbia,” he said. “That’s the way they rule.”

In Washington, the Clinton administration said it took Draskovic’s allegation seriously but had no proof of Belgrade’s involvement in this week’s shooting. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called it “the latest appalling incident reflecting the climate of violence that the Milosevic regime has fostered.”

The shooting sent new tremors of insecurity through a Serbian opposition movement already reeling from the shutdown last month of Draskovic’s Studio B, which was Serbia’s main opposition television channel, and of two radio stations.

“It’s a message to all of us that we’re not safe in Montenegro,” said Zarko Korac, an opposition strategist in Belgrade. “It’s a reminder of how unprotected we are anywhere in Yugoslavia.”

Other politicians said Draskovic might have enemies other than Milosevic. The opposition leader’s recent reluctance to lead street protests against the regime or commit his party to an all-out electoral campaign fed speculation that he is seeking a power-sharing deal with the strongman.

That, according to the speculation, could have made Draskovic a target of rival oppositionists or of Vojislav Seselj, an ultranationalist who might be displaced from Milosevic’s ruling coalition in the event of such a deal.

“Everyone was unhappy with Draskovic,” said the leader of a small opposition party. “There’s a penalty for having one foot in one camp and one foot in the other.”

In the interview, Draskovic denied any hope of joining forces “with a dictator who is trying to kill me.” His opposition party objects to participation in local and federal parliamentary elections, which are likely to be called for November, under what he called “the current state of terror.”

“I am disappointed by the other opposition parties,” he said. “I hope they will now realize that an election campaign under such conditions would lead to the killing of many of our candidates.”