Albanian teenagers injured during rocket attack of Serbian town

THREE blasts rocked a town in Serbia’s volatile south close to the troubled Kosovo province, injuring two teenagers, authorities said yesterday.

The explosions late last night were near a community centre for residents of Presevo, 190 miles south of Belgrade. The town of more than 20,000 people is populated predominantly by ethnic Albanians but also has a small Serb minority.

According to a statement by the local government office, two projectiles fired from a rocket-propelled grenade launcher landed in the yard of the centre while a third hit a private home nearby.

The statement suggested a police station adjoining the centre may have been the target.

Two teenagers, both ethnic Albanians from neighbouring Macedonia visiting relatives in the region, were injured in the blasts. They were part of a group of 10 youths gathered outside the centre at the time of the attack.

Rahmi Mustafa, leader of the Democratic Party of Albanians in Presevo, said he believed the explosions were not “ethnically motivated” but a random act of violence.

But Mica Markovic, a regional official representing the Serbian government, called the blasts “another terrorist act ... by those opposed to a peaceful life together”.

Police had sealed off the area and were investigating, witnesses said.

Serbia’s Presevo Valley region along the boundary to Kosovo was the scene of an ethnic Albanian insurgency in 2000-2001.

It has been mostly peaceful since the clashes ended in a Western-brokered peace plan, but several flare-ups were reported this month. Belgrade has blamed ethnic Albanian armed groups of trying to provoke the Serb forces.

Most recently, the Serbian government said in mid-August that a border checkpoint had been targeted by fire from automatic weapons. Later, the self-styled Albanian National Army, a little-known militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack.

During the Presevo Valley insurgency, ethnic Albanian rebels tried to unite the forested and mountainous swathe of territory with neighbouring Kosovo.