Bomb Blast in Kosovo’s Capital Injures 1

An explosion rocked the center of Kosovo’s provincial capital on Friday, shattering windows and damaging the offices of Serbian, ethnic Albanian and other political parties all housed in one building.

One person suffered cuts and bruises, and several others were in shock after the blast in Pristina, said British Flight Lt. Tim Serrell-Cooke, speaking for NATO peacekeepers. North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials said the explosion appeared to have been caused by a bomb planted behind the office building.

“It just exploded from the middle of nowhere, and we didn’t know what hit us,” said Linda Spahiu, who works for the party representing Kosovo’s Turkish minority. She suffered cuts to her face from the blast.

Yugoslavia claimed that the blast was an attack on its liaison office, which is in the same building. The head of the liaison office in Pristina, Stanimir Vukicevic, accused the U.N. Mission in Kosovo and the international peacekeeping force of condoning the attack, the state-run Tanjug news agency said.

Vukicevic said the attack was aimed at “ethnically cleansing and eradicating the presence of Yugoslavia from Kosovo.” Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, has been run by the United Nations since the end of NATO’s 78-day air war last year.

The building is run by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE is in charge of building democracy in the province, still racked by ethnic hatreds and lawlessness more than a year after NATO’s air war forced an end to Serbia’s deadly crackdown on ethnic Albanians.