NATO holds line in tense north Kosovo after riots

The violence was the worst since Kosovo's Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia on Feb. 17 and highlighted the risk of the new state's partition along ethnic lines.

A Ukrainian police officer serving with the United Nations died overnight of injuries sustained in the riots. A U.N. source said he died of shrapnel wounds. Polish, French and Ukrainian police were also injured, some seriously. Soldiers in armoured personnel carriers (APCs) secured key positions in the flashpoint town, where Serbs bitterly opposed to Kosovo's independence clashed with U.N. police and NATO peacekeepers on Monday.

The main bridge over the Ibar river that divides the Serb north from the Albanian south was closed, with razor-wire and upturned garbage containers blocking the way. Kosovo Serb police were patrolling the streets.

In a sign of the tension in the town, French troops in an APC, apparently panicked by a group of Serbs, slammed into a traffic light and threw shock bomb. The U.N. mission that has run Kosovo since the 1998-99 war said the withdrawal of its police and civilian staff from the Kosovo Serb stronghold of north Mitrovica was only temporary, but could not say when they would return.

The violence, sparked by a U.N. police operation to retake a U.N. court seized three days earlier by protesting Serbs, cast further doubt on the deployment in the north of a European Union police mission intended to take over much of the role of the U.N. administration in Kosovo.

AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE

It left NATO holding the line. But the 16,000-strong peace force has ruled out policing the new state, a job the United Nations is supposed to hand over to the European Union over a four-month transition period. "We will maintain our intention to deploy the mission throughout the territory of Kosovo," the EU's new Kosovo envoy, Pieter Feith, told a news conference.

NATO said its troops came under automatic gunfire as Serbs converged on the court following the dawn raid. Serb media reports said about 70 civilians were wounded, along with dozens of U.N. police and soldiers of the NATO-led peacekeeping force.

The EU last month withdrew a small advance team from north Mitrovica for security reasons. A U.N. spokesman said U.N. staff would return "as soon as the security situation permits". Backed by big-power ally Russia, Serbia has rejected Kosovo's secession and its recognition by the United States and a majority of the EU's 27 members.Â

About 120,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo among 2 million ethnic Albanians. Almost half live in the north, adjacent to Serbia and in complete isolation from the capital Pristina. They reject the incoming EU mission as "occupiers".

Russia on Monday demanded restraint by NATO and Serbia said it was consulting Moscow on joint steps to protect Kosovo Serbs.

Serbia lost control over Kosovo in 1999, when NATO bombed to drive out Serb forces and halt the killing and ethnic cleansing of Albanians in a two-year Serb counter-insurgency war. Belgrade is now strengthening a network of parallel structures in Serb areas of Kosovo, severing ties between Serbs and Albanians in all aspects of civic life. "We have to be present here as a state to provide security for Kosovo Serbs," Serbia's Minister for Kosovo, Slobodan Samardzic, told Serbian state television late on Monday.