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PRISTINA, Oct 18, 1999 -- U.N. peacekeepers in Kosovo accused former KLA fighters on Sunday of violating demilitarization agreements, underlining continuing tensions over the guerrillas' reluctant to give up their security role.
The NATO-led KFOR mission said that among 350 people who took part in a commemoration in the village of Gornje Obrinje on Saturday, 15 were wearing uniforms of the still-to-be-formed Kosovo Protection Corps, five had uniforms of the former Kosovo Liberation Army and a few carried pistols.
"This gathering is a clear violation of the undertaking for demilitarization and transformation and related agreements," a KFOR statement said.
"KFOR is not going to tolerate such actions of non-compliance. An investigation is under way and subsequent action will be taken as appropriate," it said.
The separatist ethnic Albanian KLA fought Serb troops and police in Kosovo for a year before NATO launched air strikes in March to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to let international peacekeeping troops into the majority Albanian province.
Violence continues in Kosovo
Since then, Kosovo has been plagued by continuing violence, though on a far smaller scale than the campaign of terror conducted by Serb police and paramilitaries against Kosovo's Albanian population before and during the air strikes.
Saturday's gathering came a year after 26 members of one family were killed in Gornje Obrinje, 35 miles (50 km) west of the provincial capital Pristina.
Villagers said Serb paramilitaries had conducted a massacre, an allegation hotly denied by the government in Belgrade.
On Saturday, KFOR reported a couple had been shot as they were driving their car in Kosovo's capital Pristina. The man died and the woman was taken to hospital. A KFOR spokesman said he did not have information on their ethnic origin.
Around 200,000 Serbs and other minorities have left Kosovo since June and those remaining accuse members of the now-disbanded KLA of carrying out a campaign of "ethnic cleansing" against them.
The KLA's political leader Hashim Thaqi, who signed an undertaking in June with former KFOR commander General Mike Jackson to demilitarise and disarm within 90 days, has dismissed the allegation, blaming rogue elements for the attacks on Serbs.
KLA disbanded last month
Since the deadline to demilitarize elapsed last month, the wearing of KLA uniforms is now illegal, as is the carrying of weapons by all but a selected few of the former rebels.
KFOR said on Sunday that its troops on the border with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia had found 650 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition - used in automatic weapons - in two cars trying to enter Kosovo.
The drivers' identification papers were checked and they were sent back to Albania, KFOR said.
Last month a new formation, the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) was announced amid protests from local Serbs and Belgrade, who, like some former KLA guerrillas, see it as a first step towards an army for the separatist province.
KFOR says the Corps, theoretically open to Serbs and other non-Albanians, will not have any security role when it is finalized next month.
But former KLA guerrillas, who have already begun wearing KPC uniforms, were seen helping with crowd control at a demonstration in the town of Mitrovica on Friday.
The KFOR spokesman gave no details of possible sanctions against those at the Gornje Obrinje gathering.
On Saturday, KFOR said it had confiscated a weapon carried by a man wearing a KPC uniform in the western town of Istok.