Three Serb homes were destroyed by bombs in Kosovo, a UN spokeswoman said Friday, as attacks by suspected ethnic Albanian extremists continued against the province's minority populations.
Susan Manuel told reporters that two of the unoccupied homes were destroyed Wednesday in an apparent attempt to deter displaced Serbs from returning to the breakaway province, where independence-minded Albanians form a majority.
"Ironically or not it was a couple of hours after a round table discussion had taken place in Prizren on the subject of the return of displaced Serbs to the abandoned village of Sredska, so police are assuming that this was a direct reaction to that meeting," she said.
The two homes in Sredska, six miles (10 kilometers) west of Prizren in southwest Kosovo, were completely destroyed by simultaneous explosions at 2:10 PM Thursday, police said. No-one was hurt.
A third Serb-owned home was destroyed later in the day in the southeastern Kosovo village of Klokot.
The explosions came a day after a Serb security guard employed by Kosovo's UN administration, 60-year-old Miroslav Krstic, was shot dead by unknown gunmen in the southeastern village of Vitina.
Kosovo has been a UN-run international protectorate since June 1999, when a NATO-led peacekeeping force arrived in the province to bring to an end fighting between Yugoslav security forces and ethnic Albanian separatist rebels.
Some 800,000 thousand ethnic Albanians, who had fled the fighting and Belgrade's brutal campaign of murder and mass eviction, have since returned, but another 210,000 non-Albanians, the majority of them Serbs, have fled since NATO's arrival, as ethnic Albanian militants launched their own campaign of ethnic violence.
Most of the 100,000 Serbs remaining in Kosovo live in enclaves under the protection of NATO-led peacekeepers, but the attacks continue and attempts to resettle displaced minority communities have had limited success.
Last month four Ashkaeli gypsies were shot dead just two days after they returned to rebuild their destroyed homes in the Drenica valley area of central Kosovo, a stronghold of ethnic Albanian separatism -- PRISTINA (AFP)
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