U.N. Searches for Kosovo Arms Smugglers

U.N. police searched Tuesday for the driver and passenger who fled an ambulance loaded with powerful weapons after it overturned en route to this tense, divided city.

The stash included 14 antitank rocket launchers, more than 180 high-explosive grenades and more than 3,000 cartridges for guns, NATO said. U.N. police were searching for the unidentified occupants, who the police said fled after the vehicle landed in a ditch late Monday.

The ambulance, which apparently went into the ditch after attempting a U-turn just before a French checkpoint outside Kosovska Mitrovica, was marked “Cooperazione e Sviluppo [Cooperation and Development],” the name of an Italian humanitarian aid agency. In a statement, the agency said the vehicle was one it donated to the public health authority in Glogovac, a predominantly ethnic Albanian town in Kosovo.

In Washington, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the incident underscored the difficulty faced by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peacekeeping force in stopping arms from illegally entering Kosovo, which is a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

“Getting weapons in [illegally] is no hard task,” Shelton said. “You’ve got a fairly porous border. You’ve got everything from backpacks to mules that can bring in weapons, but you’ve got Lord knows how many thousands of weapons that may have been cached in the local area as [the Serbs] pulled out of there.”

Thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed by Serbian forces during Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s 18-month crackdown against separatists in Kosovo. After NATO air attacks forced the Serbian troops to withdraw last spring and the NATO-led peacekeeping force moved in, ethnic Albanians began attacking Serbs in revenge.