Near Sarajevo, Troops Fire First Shots of NATO Mission

NATO troops defending a wounded comrade opened fire in a Serbian-held suburb of Sarajevo, trading the first hostile gunfire of their fledgling mission to keep Bosnia’s peace.

“It was a quick and positive response,” NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Rayner said Friday. “They were the first shots fired by IFOR.” IFOR is the acronym for the NATO-led Implementation Force.

An Italian military engineer, Cpl. Elio Sbordoni, was wounded in the arm by an unknown attacker who fired on a hotel complex Thursday in Serb-held Vogosca, just north of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. The complex is to be the main headquarters of Italy’s 2,500 soldiers in Bosnia. The first units arrived just days ago.

Sbordoni took cover under a vehicle from the high-caliber rifle rounds, and Italian soldiers returned fire to defend him.

That violence--and the shootings of two Muslim police officers in the Croatian side of the divided city of Mostar on Friday--made clear that not everyone is ready to stop fighting.

It also was a reminder that while the international community tries to calm Bosnia-Herzegovina by dividing it between the Serbs and a Muslim-Croat federation, it cannot ignore tensions still seething between Croats and Muslims.

A U.S. soldier heading to Hungary as part of the peacekeeping mission was critically injured Friday when he touched an electrical line at a train stop in the Czech Republic, according to U.S. military officials.

The soldier, a private, was taken to a hospital in the Czech town of Valtice, about 140 miles southeast of Prague. His identity was withheld pending notification of relatives.

So far, four British soldiers and an American have been wounded by mines during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization operation, which is enforcing the U.S.-brokered peace agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio.

In Mostar, two off-duty Muslim police officers were wounded by shots fired into their car as they drove along a former front line in Croatian-held western Mostar, European Union spokesman Howard Fox said. EU officials said the shots apparently came from the Croatian side of the divided city.

The shooting left Mostar more tense than it has been at any time since Croats and Muslims stopped fighting there almost two years ago.