PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - With Russia threatening to reconsider its peacekeeping role in Kosovo, NATO reported Tuesday that gunmen fired on a convoy of Serbs returning to their homes in the U.S. sector of the province, killing one and wounding two others.
The Serb convoy was fired on Monday afternoon east of the village of Ranilug, in a part of eastern Kosovo patrolled by American and Russian troops, NATO said in a brief statement. A Serb man and women were wounded. The identify of the dead person was not released.
The Serbs had tried to return home without a military escort, NATO said.
The Ranilug area has been the scene of sharp ethnic tension. On Sept. 6, Russian troops killed three Serbs there after they refused to stop beating a wounded ethnic Albanian and instead fired at the peacekeepers. Serb villages in the area have been targeted by sporadic mortar fire.
Also, two women from another ethnic minority - Montenegrins - were found dead Monday in their home in the western city of Pec, according to a NATO statement. No further details were released.
Since NATO peacekeepers arrived here June 12, Serbs, Montenegrins, Gypsies and others have been targeted by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for Yugoslavia's bloody 18-month crackdown in Kosovo. The crackdown ended when President Slobodan Milosevic accepted a peace plan to halt NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia.
Russia has accused NATO of protecting only ethnic Albanians, who form the vast majority of the population of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant republic in the Yugoslav federation.
In Moscow, Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov warned Tuesday that Russia may reconsider its participation in peacekeeping operations in Kosovo. He accused NATO and the United Nations of trying to remove Kosovo from Yugoslavia, even though Yugoslavia nominally retains sovereignty over the province.
Ivashov complained that no efforts were being made to return Yugoslav security personnel to Kosovo, as provided for in the agreement to end the NATO bombing.
``As a result, the borders of Kosovo remain open and Albanians who did not live in Kosovo before easily cross into the region,'' Ivashov said. ``Weapons and drugs also keep coming into Kosovo.''
Ivashov said Western peacekeepers are protecting only ethnic Albanians, a charge often repeated by the Milosevic government.
The Russians are expected to press those objections when the head of the U.N. mission, Bernard Kouchner, arrives in Moscow on Wednesday for a two-day visit.
Russia's ITAR-Tass news agency said Moscow also will object to NATO and U.N. plans to reorganize the Kosovo Liberation Army into a uniformed ``Kosovo Corps'' after Sunday's deadline for the former rebel army to disband.
The Russian delegation to the U.N. General Assembly will push for complete disarmament and demilitarization of the KLA, the news agency said.
Elsewhere, 13 prisoners in the Kosovo city of Kosovska Mitrovica went on a hunger strike Monday to protest what they called the ``total disregard'' of Serbian criminal law in legal proceedings undertaken against them by the U.N. mission. Yugoslavia's Tanjug news agency reported the protest.
The group includes 11 Serbs, one Macedonian and one ethnic Albanian,
Tanjug said.
