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Curfew in Kosovo city as violence continues

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA (Yugoslavia): The volatile Kosovo city of Mitrovica was under curfew early on Monday after a second eruption of violence this month left two people dead and at least 15 wounded, including two French soldiers.

It was the first time such serious and sustained fighting had broken out between NATO peacekeepers and the Albanians the alliance intervened to help last year.

The NATO-led KFOR peace force said one Albanian sniper had been killed and four more snipers wounded in the gunbattles which raged around northern Mitrovica on Sunday afternoon. The four wounded were under guard in hospital.

Local Serb leaders said three members of their community had been wounded -- two of them shot, one the victim of a grenade.

Seventeen people were arrested for crimes linked to the violence, a KFOR spokesman said. The force extended a curfew, imposed after the last serious outbreak on February 3, to run from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. in an effort to restore calm.

NATO bombed Yugoslavia last year with the aim of ending Serb repression of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.

Serb forces withdrew last June and KFOR moved in together with the United Nations to run the territory, although it legally remains a part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia.

The day began with the grenade attack on an Albanian home in the Serb-dominated north of the ethnically divided city.

A French soldier was shot in the stomach by an unidentified sniper a few hours later, a spokesman for Kosovo's French-led northern military sector said.

Italian troops guarding one of the bridges between the two ethnic strongholds immediately returned fire.

"After these events, other snipers began shooting at our troops," said a KFOR spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Chanliau. "Extremists shot at our people. They did it on purpose, that's obvious."

The peacekeepers stressed that although only Albanian snipers had been caught, this did not mean people from other groups had not also been shooting. Serb leaders said Serbs had also opened fire, but only in self-defence.-Reuters