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UN police quit Kosovo town
Dimitar Dilkoff in Kosovo
Agence France-Presse
UN police were forced to withdraw today from the Serbian half of a Kosovo town after coming under attack as they stormed a courthouse occupied by Serbs opposed to independence.
More than 20 UN police and at least eight NATO peacekeepers were wounded in grenade and gun attacks after they moved in to regain control of a UN-run tribunal in Kosovska Mitrovica that had been occupied since Friday by
protesters.
Kosovo police spokesman Beshim Hoti said an explosion erupted as UN police moved in to arrest more than 50 Serbs who had been occupying the building in protest at Kosovo's month-old declaration of
independence.
"I suppose it was a hand grenade activated in the courthouse yard,'' he said from the capital Pristina. Another police spokesman, Veton Elshani, said 25 UN police had been injured.
Machine gun
fire was later heard and at least one member of the international security forces was shot, a witness said, leading to an order for UN forces to withdraw from the Serb-populated northern half of the ethnically divided town.
"The police are pulling out of northern Mitrovica,'' said an official from the Kosovo police mission of the United Nations.
At least 22 of the wounded UN police were Polish, Poland 's national police spokesman
Mariusz Sokolowski said in Warsaw .
"Their lives are not in danger, but some of them were unable to get back into their vehicle unaided,'' he said, adding they had been pelted with rocks, homemade explosives and had
possibly been shot at.
"They have been taken to the nearest French military hospital."
The use of weapons makes the violence the worst to have erupted in Kosovo since its ethnic Albanian-dominated
parliament unilaterally declared independence from Serbia on February 17.
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