Kosovo's first highway to open by end of year

Kosovar Prime Minister Hashim Taci on Friday visited a construction site near capital Pristina that plays host to the construction of the country's first highway, expected to become a key transport route in the Balkans. The new highway, which will be named after Kosovo's first president, Ibrahim Rugova, would make a significant contribution to country's development, Taci said in a joint press conference with Minister of Infrastructure Fehmi Muyota. The dual-carriage motorway is being constructed by American-Turkish consortium Bechtel-ENKA, which received a "Best Motorway" award for the project by Engineering News-Record (ENR), a US-based publication on the global construction industry. The 102-kilometer highway, estimated to cost the Kosovar government over 1 billion euro, is planned to extend from Morine, at the southwest border with Albania, to the north of the Kosovar capital. Seventy percent of the construction has been finished, Minister Muyota said, with the end of 2013 expected to mark a timely completion. Prime Minister Taci said if the project ends on schedule, work may begin on another motorway between the capital and Skopje, the largest city of Macedonia.