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PRISTINA (Reuters) - An international U.N. staff member shot dead in a busy street in the Kosovo capital may have been killed because he was heard speaking Serbian, officials said Tuesday.
The attack, Monday evening in the center of Pristina, shocked international officials who have poured into the Serbian province over the past few months, and prompted Kosovo's U.N. mission to issue a warning to the local population.
"The international community who sends us their sons and daughters, so committed to helping this ravaged land to heal, will not accept exposing them to such brutality," said Bernard Kouchner, the French head of the U.N. administration.
The U.N. mission in Kosovo named the man, the first international staff member to be killed in Kosovo, as Valentin Krumov. It said he was a 38-year-old Bulgarian national.
But Kouchner, on a visit to Paris, told reporters he understood the man was a U.S. citizen of Bulgarian origin.
VICTIM HAD BEEN IN KOSOVO ONLY A FEW HOURS
Krumov arrived in Pristina from New York only a few hours before he was killed, U.N. spokeswoman Nadia Younes said.
"A crowd of ethnic Albanians assaulted and took him 50 meters (yards) away where someone shot him dead, shot him in the head," she said.
"Police say he had apparently responded in the Serbian language to a question from a group of passers-by who had asked him for the time."
The killing underscored the intense ethnic hatred still prevalent between Serbs and the province's Albanian majority, angry at years of Serb repression.
Serbs have been the target of hundreds of attacks since the U.N. and the KFOR peacekeeping force moved into Kosovo in mid- June, after 11 weeks of NATO bombing and the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces.
But the fact the latest attack took place right in the heart of Pristina, in the city's Mother Theresa Street, and had killed an international official sparked particular revulsion.
The street, which has the city's main hotel at one end and the U.N. mission headquarters at the other, is closed off to traffic in the evenings and becomes a focal point for night-life.
U.N. MISSION CHIEF CALLS KILLING DISGUSTING
"It was a disgusting and cowardly act carried out in a public venue where hundreds of people enjoy walking in the evenings," Kouchner said in a statement released in Pristina.
"This innocent man who came here to help Kosovo achieve a democratic way of life was instead stopped by a crowd of thugs and an assassin's bullet," he said.
The U.N. is charged with running all aspects of civilian life until elections can be held to allow the people of Kosovo to take charge of their own affairs.
The killing took place just two days before U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was due to visit Kosovo.
Younes said security guidelines for U.N. personnel in Kosovo were being reviewed as a result of the incident.