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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldsnow who wrote (13283)	7/3/1999 10:18:00 AM
From: Milk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

British Troops Kill Two Kosovo Revelers Saturday July 3 8:38 AM ET By Michael Roddy PRISTINA, Serbia (Reuters) - Two people were killed and two wounded when British paratroopers fired on a carload of people celebrating the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Day early Saturday, spokesmen for the KFOR peacekeeping force said. The shooting occurred following gunfire coming from the car as it passed close to a public building guarded by British troops at the request of 50 Serbs who were sheltering inside. It was the bloodiest incident in Pristina involving international peace troops since they moved into Kosovo last month, occurring toward the tail end of a riotous celebration which included widespread firing of weapons into the air. KFOR also said it would hand back five Yugoslav army soldiers detained inside Kosovo this week. ''Belgrade said it was a simple map-reading error on the part of the patrol and that explanation must have satisfied KFOR,'' a KFOR spokesman said. KFOR detained the five soldiers Thursday just inside Kosovo's boundary with the rest of Serbia. Major Jan Joosten told reporters at a KFOR briefing that the shooting in Pristina happened just after midnight and that one person was killed instantly, one died of his wounds later in hospital and two people were being treated for injuries. A Reuters television crew located one of the injured at the main Pristina hospital but the young man was unable to speak as he appeared to have been shot in the jaw. Joosten said that officials of Kosovo's largely moribund Serbian provisional government, which has offices on the north side of Pristina, had requested protection from British forces for some 50 people staying in the building. A KFOR statement said a car carrying eight people, some on the roof, had passed in front of the building guarded by paratroopers of the 1st Battalion and a burst of automatic gunfire was then heard. It said three of the British soldiers fired at the car, ''believing their lives were in danger.'' Pressed by reporters to say whether the gunfire from the people in the car had been fired in the air or at the soldiers, Joosten said the incident was being investigated by British military police. ''I would not argue with the soldiers on guard. They felt their lives were in danger and had the right to defend themselves. Any loss of life is regrettable but I stress that any KFOR soldier who finds his life in danger will respond quickly and robustly,'' Joosten said. Asked if the celebratory shooting of everything from pistols to heavy machineguns did not show that huge numbers of weapons were still in circulation in Pristina despite KFOR's disarmament mandate, Joosten said peacekeepers had so far confiscated some 1,400 weapons at checkpoints. He said, however, that KFOR had not tried to seize weapons during Saturday night's celebration in order to avoid confrontations. ''In a situation like last night it was not very wise to start confiscating weapons.'' The shooting was the third deadly confrontation British troops have had so far in Kosovo. One man in the company of two Serbian interior ministry police was shot dead in Pristina on the second day of the KFOR deployment when he leveled a pistol at British soldiers. Another man was killed in similar circumstances in the western town of Lipljan Wednesday. KFOR has a policy of not divulging the nationalities of people involved in such incidents.

To: goldsnow who wrote (13283)	7/3/1999 10:24:00 AM
From: Milk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

US Military Attaché In Moscow Ordered Expelled WASHINGTON, Jul 3, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Russia has declared a US military attaché in Moscow "persona non grata" and ordered him to leave the country this week, the Washington Times reported Friday, citing US military sources. Lieutenant Colonel Pete Hoffman, the assistant army attaché, was notified last week by the Russian Foreign Ministry of the expulsion order, the report said. The Pentagon and State Department had no immediate comment on the report. The newspaper said the Pentagon was puzzled by the action, the latest sign of military friction between Russia and the United States. The Times cited a source as saying Hoffman may have been singled out because he was part of the US team in Helsinki that negotiated an agreement on the role of Russian forces in the peacekeeping operations in Kosovo. Another source said his expulsion might have been in retaliation for the expulsion last spring of a Russian intelligence officer assigned to the United Nations headquarters in New York ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)