[Prishtina-E] (no subject)

[jeton ademaj]

hey guys, 2 articles of interest....

World



Wednesday, August 23 2:28 AM SGT

Emirati peacekeepers kill two Kosovo Albanians
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Aug 22 (AFP) -
Two Kosovo Albanians, a father and his son, died after they were shot by 
Emirati peacekeepers during a scuffle with an officer, officials said 
Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Emirati batallion in the UN-administered Yugoslav 
province, Lieutenant Abdullah Said al-Falassi, said the soldiers had "acted 
in self-defence" after a group of four people stormed a checkpoint and tried 
to seize weapons from Emirati contingent, the Emirati news agency WAM 
reported.

The incident happened late Monday at a KFOR checkpoint in the village of 
Svinjare, in northern Kosovo.

"One of the Emirati soldiers fired warning shots towards the four people who 
continued their attack," Falassi said.

"That's when one of the soldiers fired, acting in legitimate defense to 
protect his comrades."

The chief spokesman for the KFOR multinational peacekeeping force, Major 
Scott Slaten, gave a different version of what led up to the shooting.

He said that the two ethnic Albanians shot, aged 54 and 21, became 
aggressive with peacekeepers conducting "normal security operations at the 
checkpoint".

"During the altercation, the men seriously assaulted a KFOR United Arab 
Emirate (UAE) officer. A KFOR UAE soldier intervened to protect his officer 
and fired several shots at the men," he said.

The father died on his way to a hospital for civilians run by Moroccan 
peacekeepers in Mitrovica. The son was operated on in a French military 
hospital, but died Tuesday at around 2:00 p.m (1200 GMT), Slaten said.

The Emirati soldiers form part of the French-led northern brigade of KFOR, a 
NATO-led force charged with security in the Yugoslav province since the end 
of Kosovo's 1998-1999 civil war.

An investigation has been lauched into the incident, with officers from the 
main KFOR headquarters in Pristina joining colleagues in the French sector, 
Slaten said.

UN police called to the scene said the scuffle apparently broke out after 
the ethnic Albanians "decided to ridicule the officers," according to UN 
spokeswoman Claire Trevena.

The UN officers reported that the father had continued to behave violently 
after his son was shot and was then also shot, she said.


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World






Tuesday, August 22 8:31 PM SGT

Four members of ethnic Albanian guerrilla group detained: KFOR
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Aug 22 (AFP) -
Four members of an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group which operates in Serbia 
have been detained in Kosovo by troops searching for two missing Serbs, a 
KFOR spokesman said Tuesday.

Sergeant Pat McGuire said the four had been detained by KFOR and UN police 
officers on August 2O in the village of Novo Selo, in southeastern Kosovo on 
the province's boundary with Serbia's tense Presevo Valley area.

"The men were stopped in a black jeep which was being looked for in relation 
to an investigation into the disappearance of two Serbs," McGuire said.

"They were taken to Gnjilane where their details were checked on a computer 
database and they were found to be members of the UCPMB ... They were 
transferred to the US military base at Camp Bondsteel, where they are being 
held for questioning."

The UCPMB, the self-styled Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and 
Bujanovac, is a rebel group based just inside Serbia fighting Serb security 
forces in the Presevo Valley area, home to some 70,000 ethnic Albanians and 
which it dubs "Eastern Kosovo."

McGuire said that one of the arrested men was Shefket Musliu, a known UCPMB 
commander. The Kosovo Albanian dailies Zeri and Kosova Sot reported Tuesday 
that Musliu had been arrested along with Vullnet Ibishi and Lirim Jakupi, 
and a fourth UCPMB fighter.

Kosova Sot said the men were guests at a wedding and were not armed when 
arrested.

Two Serbs have been missing in the area around Kamenice, six 
mileskilometres) from Novo Selo since August 12, when they set off on a 
tractor towards an ethnic Albanian area to buy petrol.

Gary Carrell, the UN police commander in Kosovo's southeastern region, told 
AFP that UN police and KFOR had been searching the area ever since without 
finding any trace of the missing men or their tractor.

"We've been going up there everyday and working with KFOR to search the 
area, but we have not found them," he said.

Serbs have regularly been the victims of ethnic violence in Kosovo since a 
NATO air campaign brought an end to a civil war between ethnic Albanian 
separatists and Belgrade's forces, and KFOR moved in to the province.

On Friday, 10 Serbian children were injured when unidentified attackers 
threw hand grenades into a basketball court from a passing car.

The Presevo Valley area of southern Serbia has, like Kosovo, an ethnic 
Albanian majority population.

The UCPMB, which is thought to be linked to separatist groups in Kosovo, has 
vowed to liberate the ethnic Albanians from Yugoslav rule, raising fears 
that fighting might spread beyond the enclave the group controls on the 
border.

US troops serving with KFOR announced on July 31 that they had reinforced 
their positions along the frontier in an attempt to stop violence spilling 
over into Kosovo and cut off rebel supply lines.

Major Scott Slaten, KFOR's chief spokesman, told AFP that a computer 
database had been set up to record the details of known UCPMB fighters.

US troops stationed on the boundary near the UCPMB's village base of 
Dobrosin, within a five-kilometre (three-mile) wide demilitarised zone on 
the Serb side of the boundary, regularly hear fighting between the group and 
Yugoslav security forces.


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