Albania Sends Troops to Put Down Rioting by ‘Hooligans’

Albania said soldiers and police moved in to deal with hundreds of “hooligans” attacking officials and dynamiting buildings in a northern city Thursday, a day after Albania’s first non-Communist party was founded.

Official reports said attackers with knives and iron bars assaulted the local police chief and two other police officers in Shkodra.

Order appeared to have been restored late Thursday, according to a radio journalist reached in Tirana, the capital of Albania.

A report by Stalinist Albania’s official ATA news agency said the rioters were “without any political aims.”

Although Albania’s Communist leadership has made recent concessions, it has rejected the kind of far-reaching changes that led to the fall of such governments in the rest of Eastern Europe.

The attackers in Shkodra hurled stones “and whatever else they could” at Communist Party and government buildings and sacked the radio station, official reports said.

Albanian radio said the rioters used “dynamite in order to destroy different buildings,” but police and troops refrained from using arms against the attackers. No casualties were reported.

On Wednesday, tens of thousands of Albanians held a peaceful rally in Tirana, 80 miles south of the capital, to celebrate the founding of the Democratic Party of Albania.