Troops on Alert in Kosovo as Talks Continue

Yugoslav armored vehicles and troops stood on alert near this northern village Sunday while international monitors sought to avert an explosion of the Kosovo crisis, urging ethnic Albanian rebels to free eight captive soldiers.

Reflecting fears that the talks’ failure could prompt all-out fighting in the Serbian province, Javier Solana, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, appealed in Brussels for the soldiers’ release. He also called on both sides to show restraint.

A spokesman for international observers monitoring a cease-fire reached in October expressed cautious optimism that the mediation would succeed in heading off a military showdown.

Yugoslav forces pulled back their armor half a mile Sunday, the spokesman said, in an apparent signal of cooperation with negotiations.

The rebel Kosovo Liberation Army issued a statement Sunday night saying it would release the captives only if international mediators work out an agreement that includes “our soldiers and civilians.” The separatists also said they will respect the cease-fire except when they have to protect civilians and themselves.

“We’ve had signs that the situation could be calming down,” said Heinz Nitsch, spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is overseeing the peace agreement in the Serbian province. Serbia is the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

Meanwhile, parents of the captive soldiers began arriving, hopeful of a release. Yugoslav officials said the soldiers took a wrong turn Friday into rebel territory. But the separatists said the soldiers were in an armored vehicle that was firing on civilians.

A second day of retaliatory attacks on a rebel-held area to the east had been feared, but there was no evidence of fighting there.

Yugoslav army and Serbian police forces that threatened attack if the soldiers were not released remained deployed outside the village of Stari Trg, 30 miles north of the provincial capital, Pristina.

The monitors said the captive soldiers, held in a building on a mountainside near the village, were being treated well.

An ethnic Albanian teenager was killed during the shelling, said spokesman Fernando del Mundo of the U.N. refugee agency.

Also Sunday, the Kosovo Information Center, which is run by ethnic Albanians, said one person was killed and another wounded Saturday near the southern town of Urosevac.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, angry demonstrators beat up five members of a U.N. police force after NATO troops killed a Bosnian war crimes suspect, officials said Sunday. Two of the officers were hospitalized.

Saturday’s attack came after an attempt to arrest Dragan Gagovic, a Bosnian Serb accused of raping and torturing Muslim women during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Gagovic was shot and killed near the eastern town of Foca.