Four Kosovo Serbs last seen travelling from the southern Serbian town of Presevo back to Kosovo through a disputed buffer zone have been reported missing, police said Monday.
Brothers Goran and Milosav Miljkovich and their friends Sasha Peshich and Milan Kostich were last seen at 2:00 pm (1300 GMT) on Saturday when they passed the last police checkpoint in the zone in the village of Cerevajka, police Colonel Novica Zdravkovic said.
They were trying to return to the southeastern Kosovo town of Gnjilane across a demilitarized border strip largely controlled by ethnic Albanian rebels demanding union with the breakaway province.
Zdravkovic said the four, aged between 19 and 22, never reached the checkpoint manned by NATO-led KFOR peacekeepers on the administrative border with Kosovo, three kilometers (1.8 miles) from the Serbian police post.
Serbian authorities were in close contact with KFOR to further the investigation, said Dragan Subasic, one of Serbia's three interim justice ministers.
Between 800 and 1,500 rebels from the self-proclaimed Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) have gained control of several villages and key positions in the buffer zone between UN-administered Kosovo and the rest of Serbia.
Serbian police, chased out of the zone by the rebels in November, re-took a strategic hilltop in the zone Sunday, officials said -- BUJANOVAC (AFP)
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