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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - U.N. police are investigating several fellow officers suspected of pressuring Serbs to sell their homes to ethnic Albanians at prices below market value, a U.N. official said today.
The inquiry was launched after Serbian media reported that two U.N. officers told Serbs they should sell their homes to Albanians and instructed them to contact an ethnic Albanian lawyer to draw up the contracts.
Many Serbs are keen to leave Kosovo because of attacks by ethnic Albanians seeking revenge for the Serb crackdown that left 10,000 people dead before NATO bombing forced Serb forces to withdraw in June.
Serb media reports identified one of the officers under investigation as John Henderson. The U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed an officer with that name was under investigation but declined to give his nationality or other details.
Ekrem Smaili, the lawyer named in the reports, confirmed he knew Henderson but said he also did not know his nationality. He said he had no business relationship with the officer.
Smaili denied that the properties were being sold below market value.
``Every transaction is done properly to show they were not selling under coercion,'' he said.
On Wednesday, NATO officials spoke of the newest form of anti-Serb intimidation - bogus lists of Serb war crimes suspects, some signed by banned Kosovo Liberation Army or local, self-declared Albanian police units. It wasn't clear if the signatures were real.
``Our concern is that you could have people killed by the fact that someone hates someone else and puts their name on a list,'' said a NATO spokesman, Maj. Roland Lavoie.
Such posters are bound to strengthen Serb determination to defend themselves, adding to already high ethnic tensions in the province and blocking international attempts to establish cooperation between the two hostile groups.
Lavoie also detailed more attacks on Serbs - unknown assailants hitting Serb houses in the eastern village of Migola with rocket-propelled grenade and automatic weapons fire. Serbs returned fire, he said. In another recent incident, a Serb man was wounded by a shot to the chest in Urosevac, a U.S.-controlled town south of Pristina.
Despite such attacks and intimidation, the United Nations has rejected Serb plans to set up self-rule in parts of the province and an all-Serb defense force.
Serb leaders argue that their own secure enclaves and protection force are the only way to prevent the remaining Serbs from fleeing the province. Estimates of remaining Serbs vary from 20,000 to 100,000, down from 200,000 before a mass exodus prompted by revenge attacks by ethnic Albanians following the end of NATO's bombing.
Still, NATO said Wednesday that some Serbs were returning to areas that the NATO-led peacekeepers were protecting.
NATO, meanwhile, condemned the Yugoslav government for ordering international air traffic controllers throughout the region not to clear commercial flights to and from Pristina. While the government remains sovereign in Kosovo, NATO spokesman Maj. Ole Irgens said NATO-led peacekeepers have authority over its airspace. Negotiations are continuing to restart flights in the near future, he said.