North Macedonia police said Tuesday they had arrested three former convicts in their twenties accused of creating a terrorist cell linked to the Islamic State group and stockpiling weapons. Police seized numerous weapons, ammunition and two belts with explosives in raids at three locations in capital Skopje and nearby Kumanovo, the interior ministry said in a statement. The three suspects followed the "ideology of the well-known terrorist organisation ISIS with the intention of conducting terrorist acts against targets on the territory of... North Macedonia", the ministry added. Aged 22 to 28, the suspects had already served prison sentences for the crime of belonging to a foreign military -- the sentence handed down to many who left North Macedonia to join IS. According to police, around 150 North Macedonia nationals travelled to fight alongside jihadists in Iraq and Syria, mainly between 2012 and 2016. Among those fighters, 36 were killed and around 80 returned to North Macedonia, according to a 2019 report by the US State Department. str-ssm/tgb