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BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, Sept. 2 (UPI) Violent crime is increasingly striking the small Gypsy minority in Kosovo, as general chaos among Serbs and ethnic Albanians continues mostly unfettered.
KFOR spokesman Maj. Roland Lavoie said today four members of a Gypsy family were murdered Wednesday in the village of Gornji Dragoljevci, south of Istok.
Radio Pancevo reported that KFOR military police were called and confirmed that a man, his wife and daughter, and an elderly woman were shot and killed.
The radio said an investigation was under way.
The Gypsies, or Romany minority, are enmeshed in the Serb-Albanian racial violence that led to NATO's war against Yugoslavia. When Kosovo's ethnic Albanians fled en masse to neighboring Albania and Macedonia, Kosovo Gypsies who generally speak Serb in public life stayed behind, leading to allegations that the Gypsies looted Albanian homes and committed various other crimes, such as prying the gold fillings from dead Albanians' teeth. Gypsies later told peacekeepers that some of them were pressed into service to bury massacred ethnic Albanians.
In other violence reported from Kosovo, KFOR spokesmen say Irish peacekeeping troops at a checkpoint near Pristina discovered a person with gunshot wounds to both legs. The injured person was found in a car early today, KFOR said.
Radio Pancevo also reported that French KFOR troops had found a car close to the village of Ljosetici Wednesday with three people inside, one of them dead. Another man was wounded and was taken by the troops to an army hospital. The third man escaped injuries. KFOR immediately launched an investigation, the radio reported.
A bomb was thrown at a Serbian house in Lipljan on Wednesday, and three people were injured in the attack, one seriously.
The Finish KFOR battalion that controls the area evacuated the wounded and stepped up patrols, Pancevo reported.
The private news agency Beta reported that a blockade of the Pristina to Gnjilane Road was still in place today after being built Wednesday by Serbs in the village of Gracanica, near the Serbian monastery of the same name.
The blockade was erected in protest against the recent abduction of a Serb villager.
Beta said the Serbs in the village on Wednesday delivered demands to KFOR and the U.N. civilian mission that every effort be made to find the kidnapped man and two other people from the neighboring village of Badovac, who were abducted earlier.
The road will be blocked until the requests have been met, the villagers told Beta.