One Kosovo Serb was shot and killed and another died of a heart attack during a protest against NATO-led peacekeepers in which three vehicles were burned and Belgian troops fired "warning shots," a military spokesman told AFP Sunday.
Two Serbs were shot Saturday afternoon in "circumstances which have yet to be explained" as they took part in a violent protest outside the UN building and Belgian barracks in the northern Kosovo town of Leposavic Lieutenant Colonel Alban Desgrees Delou said.
Both injured protesters were taken to a military hospital in nearby Kosovska Mitrovica, where one died, he said. The other was being treated. A third Serb who apparently suffered a heart attack in the crowd also died, he added.
A spokesman for the French-led northern brigade of Kosovo's KFOR peacekeeping force said it was not yet clear who had fired the fatal shots.
The protest erupted at around 3:30 pm (1430 GMT) Saturday after United Nations police arrested Vladimir Tomovic, a Kosovo Serb "known by police as a criminal", Desgrees Delou said.
An angry crowd surrounded the barracks of the Belgian contingent of KFOR, trapped three military vehicles and threw stones at the nearby UN administrative building.
Seven occupants of the vehicles, including one civilian member of staff, were forced to abandon them and retreat, uninjured into to the barracks. The vehicles, a jeep and two light trucks, were burned by the crowd and completely destroyed, Desgrees Delou said.
The Yugoslav news agencies Beta and Tanjug said that the Belgian troops had fired into a crowd of around 1,000 demonstrators and named the dead men as Bojan Jokovic and Trifun Milenkovic.
More protests were planned Sunday and a delegation of local Serb politicians had demanded that the commander of the French KFOR gendarmerie detachment in Leposavic order that Serb police working with the United Nations be withdrawn from the town, the agencies said.
The crowd continued to press at the gate of the camp and the peacekeepers dispersed them with tear gas and warning shots, he said. Following the deaths, the situation in Leposavic remained "tense" Sunday, he added.
The town is in the far north of Kosovo in the only area of the breakaway Yugoslav province which is still largely inhabited by Serbs. The area has been the scene of frequent confrontations between troops and local people opposed to NATO and the United Nations' intervention in the province.
Kosovo has been run as an international protectorate since the arrival of KFOR in June 1999 brought an end to the conflict between Yugoslav forces and ethnic Albanian separatist rebels.
While Kosovo Albanians, who suffered persecution from Slobodan Milosevic's Belgrade regime before the war and murder and mass eviction during it, regard UN-rule as the first step to independence, most Kosovo Serbs oppose this.
Arrests of suspected extremists and criminals from the Serb community often provoke violent confrontations in the area --
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AFP)
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