Serbian president congratulates Handke over Nobel Prize

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic congratulated Austrian author Peter Handke for winning this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.

Handke, 77, was awarded despite his open support to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 at the international tribunal in The Hague on trial for war crimes and genocide.

He claimed that the Muslim Bosniaks in Sarajevo had killed themselves, adding that he never believed that the Serbs had committed genocide in Srebrenica.

"Please receive my most sincere congratulations. As a Nobel Prize laureate, you are inscribed among the immortals. This award is an award for your outstanding literary work, for your knowledge and creativity, but also for your unrivaled moral qualities, for courage and dignity to fight for your ideals of a prominent intellectual," said Vucic on the presidential site.

Vucic also invited Handke to visit Serbia.

"Serbia regards you as a true friend and I will avail myself to the opportunity to say that we perceive your Nobel Prize as having been won by one of us. Now, along with Ivo Andric, we are celebrating yet another of our Nobel Prize winners," said Vucic.

Several countries including Turkey boycotted the award ceremony.

Turkish, Albanian, Kosovar and Croatian envoys to Sweden did not attend the ceremony.