Land Mines Kill Three Serb Police Officers Near Kosovo

Three Serbian police officers were killed by antitank mines near the border with Kosovo on Sunday, and Yugoslav officials said the incident was part of a broader terror campaign by ethnic Albanians.

Ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the border area, where sporadic clashes over the last year have claimed about 30 lives, said that one of their members was killed and that two more were wounded in fighting with Serbian forces later in the day.

Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic, in an urgent letter to NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, linked the blasts to an attack on a bus in ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo on Friday that killed seven Serbs and wounded dozens more.

“It is obvious that we are dealing with well-planned, premeditated and synchronized attacks aimed at provoking Yugoslav security forces and creating a much broader conflict,” Svilanovic wrote in the letter, which was quoted by the independent Beta news agency in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital.

“The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia cannot allow Albanian terrorists to kill its citizens,” Svilanovic said.

But the guerrillas in the Presevo Valley area near the boundary distanced themselves from the bus bombing. In a statement, they condemned the attack and said it would set back efforts to resolve their conflict with Serbian forces.

Svilanovic demanded that North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops in Kosovo take measures to seal the boundary. Otherwise, he said, Serbian forces, praised by the West so far for their restraint in the area, would “take responsibility and . . . start solving the problem adequately.”

Serbian officials said the police vehicle hit two land mines that had been planted near the village of Lucane, a few miles from the boundary with Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the larger of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

A local ethnic Albanian political party said it was saddened by the deaths and condemned violence.

“We also maintain that peace talks must get underway as soon as possible to resolve the crisis peacefully, in order to avoid any more victims,” said Nasufi Behlul of the Party of Democratic Action.

Later in the day, Serbian officials said, Serbian police came under attack while clearing the debris from the blast area. They said that guerrilla snipers fired bullets and mortar shells and that police returned fire.

But Januz Musliu, a political representative of the rebel group, said the Serbs started the skirmish by firing at rebel positions. One fighter was killed and two were wounded, he said.

The guerrillas say they are fighting Serbian repression of the substantial ethnic Albanian population in the Presevo Valley. Serbian officials have branded them terrorists whose only goal is to join the area to Kosovo.

NATO, anxious to bolster Serbia’s new democratic rulers, has called on the rebels to lay down their arms and given cautious backing to a Serbian peace plan.