PRISTINA, March 13 — A prominent Kosovan lawyer, once a leading opponent of the Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, was shot outside his home in Pristina today, the police and doctors said.

Azem Vllasi, 68, was shot in the shoulder by an attacker in front of his apartment at around 8:00 am (0700 GMT), the police said.

He was taken to hospital where doctors said his injury was not life-threatening.

According to media reports the assailant presented himself as a potential client.

Vllasi’s wife, Nadira Avdic Vllasi, who witnessed the attack, told AFP that the man used a pistol with a silencer.

The police said they were searching for the attacker, and did not know of a motive.

In the communist Yugoslavia, Vllasi was a close ally of president Josip Broz Tito and a top official in Kosovo.

After Tito’s death in 1980, Vllasi strongly opposed Milosevic’s push to roll back the political autonomy that Kosovo had enjoyed under his rule.

In the late 1980s he was the first high-ranking ethnic Albanian to be detained and tried under Milosevic, though a court later acquitted him.

The suspension of autonomy in Kosovo, with its ethnic Albanian majority, led to the 1998-1999 conflict with Belgrade that ended after a Nato air campaign that ousted Milosevic’s security forces from Kosovo.

That paved the way for Kosovo’s independence a decade later, which Belgrade refuses to recognise, considering it a province of Serbia. — AFP