2 Police Officers, 2 Workers Killed in Attacks in Kosovo

A police officer and two power station workers, all ethnic Albanians, were killed in Kosovo on Friday, newspapers said Saturday, quoting Serbian sources.

The body of a second police officer was found in the province the same day, the official Yugoslav news agency Tanjug said, without specifying when the man was killed.

The reports implied that ethnic Albanian guerrillas were responsible for the four killings. There was no confirmation from the ethnic Albanian side.

“Jafer Cori, a policeman from Glogovac, and two workers from the Kosovo power company Elektrokosmet--Nazif Muljaj and Ibrahim Musliju--were shot dead at around 1500 local time on Friday by unknown perpetrators,” the Serb-run Pristina media center was quoted as saying.

The two power company workers were repairing a transformer while Cori was standing near them when all came under fire, the media center said, adding that Cori had been attacked earlier by armed ethnic Albanian separatists.

Ethnic Albanian newspapers had reported that attack, alleging it was undertaken by Serbs who wanted to remove Cori because he had witnessed a police offensive in the area.

In a separate report, Tanjug said the body of another police officer, Uk Mustafa, was found in the village of Babaj Boks near Djakovica in western Kosovo on Friday. It said he had been killed by ethnic Albanians.

The few ethnic Albanians who have joined the Serbian police in Kosovo, where the ethnic Albanian majority is seeking independence from Serbia, are viewed as traitors by the guerrillas and as objects of suspicion by some of their Serbian colleagues.

Eight months of fighting in Kosovo between Yugoslav security forces and guerrillas from the separatist ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, killed 1,500 people this year and uprooted a quarter of a million.

Yugoslav security forces were forced to halt a huge offensive against the KLA in October under threat of NATO airstrikes.

The KLA and the Yugoslav security forces have observed a fragile cease-fire for six weeks, which has been marred by isolated killings or incidents.