The government of Kosovo, while expressing regret over the circumstances in which three German intelligence agents were arrested and detained for more than a week, announced that it would not apologize for the arrests, dpa reported.
Deputy Foreign Minister Vlora Citaku in an interview published Sunday in the weekly Welt am Sonntag said the arrests were "a very unfortunately incident."
She however said Kosovo government would not apologize for the affair "with which we had nothing to do," adding that if a mistake had been made, "it was not the fault of our government."
Arrested on November 17, the three members of the Germany's BND foreign intelligence service despite protestations from Berlin and the BND of their innocence spent 10 days in detention accused of throwing an explosive device at a European Union office.
Citaku said that could not rule out the possibility that other "players in the region" had an interest in destabilizing relations between Germany and Kosovo.
"Neither the bomb nor the unfortunate development that followed were in our interests," she said.
Germany is the second biggest donor to the new ethnic Albanian republic after the United States.