TIRANA, March 15 – An Albanian Catholic priest from Rochester Hills in the United States regretted some of the language he used in a 2007 speech that recently went public on YouTube.
Rev. Anton Kcira of St. Paul Albanian Parish was speaking in his church shortly after the arrests of three Albanian Muslim men who were involved in a plot to kill U.S. soldiers at Ft. Dix in New Jersey when he made the disparaging comments.
“I was angry, very angry, about the lack of response in the Albanian and Kosovar communities against the criminals who planned to kill American soldiers,” he said Saturday. “The USA and NATO have done so much for our nation and our peoples over the years, and by not condemning the Albanian criminals, we appeared ungrateful.”
In his speech he referred to a Serbian leader at one point, saying about the Balkan conflict: “Milosevic should have done to the 1.9 million dogs in Kosovo what he did to the 260,000 dogs in Srebrenica.”
Albania is mostly Muslim, followed with Orthodox and Catholic communities.
The speech was in Albanian and believed to be recorded by someone in attendance. It was translated into English. As of Saturday evening, it was no longer posted on YouTube.
Albanian priest regrets comments on Muslims
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