PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) --
American troops of the Kosovo international peacekeeping force were fired
on in three separate incidents but no U.S. service members were hurt,
a military spokesman said Sunday.
Capt. Martin Downie, a public information officer at Camp Bondsteel
in Gnjilane spoke of "a
busy night" for the Americans Saturday in the battered southern
Serbian province. U.S. troops in Kosovo detained six people after finding
one man dead and another wounded in the southeastern town of Gnjilane,
a spokesman for American peacekeepe
In Pristina, peacekeepers spokesman Maj. Jan Joosten said that in the Italian sector shots were fired Saturday at a bus loaded with returning Albanian refugees on the road to Klina in central Kosovo. But no one was injured and no arrests were made.
The shooting incidents bore witness to continuing violence and ethnic tensions one month after KFOR, the international peacekeeing force, moved into Kosovo under an agreement ridding the province of 40,000 Yugoslav military and Serbian police forces.
After U.S. military policemen secured an area around a building near their
headquarters following an explosion, shots were fired about 30 meters
(yards) from where they were positioned. Several minutes later, a few more
rounds went off and two grenades exploded.
"They (the U.S. troops) were not able to identify who was shooting at them,
there was a lot of moving around," Downie said, adding the information
was
still preliminary and the incident was under investigation.
In response to the shooting, an infantry squad and two Bradley Fighting
Vehicles were rushed to the area to help the military police. "When they
got
to the location they found one dead male civilian ... (and) one Albanian
shot
in the leg outside that structure," he said.
After the building was ringed by U.S. troops around 6:20 p.m. (1620
GMT), five people in possession of an array of weapons were detained,
Downie said. He said he did not know whether they were Serbs or ethnic
Albanians.
The Americans found five rifles, including an AK-47, seven pistols, various
ammunition and other equipment, including cell-phones and walkie-talkies.
All weapons were to have been handed to peacekeepers several weeks ago
as part of a demilitarization procedure providing above all for the disarming
of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.
In a separate incident around that time, also in Gnjilane, a U.S. sniper
team
was fired upon from a vehicle. The team returned fire but it was not known
if
anyone of the attackers was hurt, Downie said.
About a half hour later, American troops found the vehicle from which they
had been fired on only about 200 meters (yards) away. The empty car was
blood-stained but empty.
"Half an hour later, we had (U.S.) snipers fired on again northwest of
Military Police headquarters, but the snipers did not return fire ... and
no one
was hurt or killed," Downie said.
Before midnight, U.S. troops carried out a dramatic rescue effort involving
an unidentified civilian who had sustained gunshot wounds to his head.
Downie said the man was originally picked up in Pristina and flown by
medical evacuation helicopter to the hospital in Urosevac where doctors
said
they could not treat him. So he was flown to the hospital at Camp Bondsteel
in Gnjilane.
"They tried to bring him around, but the patient died at 0600 this morning
(0400 GMT)," he said.
Meanwhile more Russian troops were flown to Kosovo to beef up
Moscow's contingent in Kosovo that is to comprise 3,600 men by the end
of the month.
Russian paratroopers began taking up positions alongside NATO-led
peacekeepers in Kosovo Saturday, starting with the U.S.-controlled sector
southeast of the provincial capital.
An advance unit of Russian soldiers arrived Saturday in the small town
of
Kosovska Kamenica, not far from where the Americans have set up Camp
Bondsteel.
NATO hopes having peacekeepers from Russia, which shares Slavic and
Eastern Orthodox traditions with Serbia, will help Kosovo's Serb minority
feel safe. But many ethnic Albanians have protested plans to put Russian
troops in their towns.
Disputes between Moscow and NATO over how and where Russian
peacekeepers repeatedly delayed deployment.
Russian troops largely have been confined to Pristina's airport since about
200 of them sped overland from Bosnia and occupied the airfield June 12,
beating NATO forces by hours and sparking a diplomatic crisis.
