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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- A Gypsy woman died today after being shot by uniformed men thought to belong to the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, officials with the NATO-led peacekeeping force said.
The shooting of the 65-year-old woman occurred late Wednesday in Suva Reka, near the southwestern city of Prizren, said NATO officials in Pristina.
Gypsies, or Roma, are accused by Kosovo Albanians of being Serb allies, and -- like Serbs -- are targets of retribution killings and other violence to avenge the 18-month Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians that ended after NATO entered the Serb province.
Another report earlier spoke of the beating death of a 65-year old Serb woman, but NATO officials said the two reports referred to the one death, of the Gypsy.
Two Serb houses also were burned late Tuesday in Prizren, a NATO official said, adding that no further details were available.
The newest violence comes after shelling in Kosovo's American-controlled eastern sector that killed two Serbs and wounded four others, one critically. Such incidents add to fears of an upsurge of violence ahead of a deadline later this month for demilitarizing the ethnic Albanian rebel army.
The shelling occurred in the village of Donja Budriga, where residents said shells landed for 20 minutes, blowing the legs off an elderly woman fetching water in her yard. She died, along with a male villager.
U.S. troops serving in the NATO-led Kosovo peacekeeping force said the attack -- and one on the nearby Serb village of Ranilug -- came after two weeks of diminishing mortar fire in the ethnically mixed area of the province under their control.
With less than two weeks until the Sept. 19 deadline for the demilitarization of the Kosovo Liberation Army, some senior KLA figures are thought to be vehemently opposed to demilitarization, despite a plan to allow the organization to maintain some of its structure as a reformed, lightly armed, civil emergency corps. The proposed corps would respond to natural disasters and assist in security missions.
In a reflection of that reluctance, eight KLA members were arrested in the western city of Djakovica in an apartment with a machine gun, ammunition, 30 cluster bombs, two 85-mm anti-tank launchers and several land mines, NATO officials said.
The International Organization for Migration, which is helping in the transformation of the KLA, said it registered 10,600 KLA members in a survey that ended Aug. 7.
Lt. Col. Robin Clifford, of the NATO peacekeepers, said that the new KLA civil organization "will have military structures."
"Tasks and forms are yet to be discussed," he told reporters.
U.S. officers Wednesday said investigators found evidence that a Chinese-manufactured 81-mm mortar was used on the attack on Ranilug. Chinese-manufactured weapons were favored by the Kosovo Liberation Army during the fighting against Serb-led Yugoslav forces that ended in June.
Most of the more than 200,000 Kosovo Serbs have fled since NATO troops replaced Serb forces at the end of the 78 days of NATO bombing. Those who remain complain that the 40,000 NATO-led troops in the province are protecting only the ethnic Albanians.
Russia has complained that Serbs are not adequately protected and has expressed unhappiness with the KLA's proposed new role.
The complaints are expected to figure in talks in Moscow next week between Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen.
Meanwhile, Austrian forensic experts working for the U.N. war crimes tribunal were digging in a mass burial site in the Kacanik mountains where 22 ethnic Albanians killed by Yugoslav troops in March were believed buried. The bodies were reportedly dumped in two abandoned wells in the village of Kotlina, near the Macedonian border about 40 miles south of Pristina.