March 27, 2000
Kosovska Mitrovica (Yugoslavia) - French troops in Kosovo found three rocket launchers, a machine gun and a rifle during a search in the flashpoint city of Mitrovica on Monday, the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force said. The peacekeepers launched the search early in the morning in the ethnically-mixed Little Bosnia district, in the tense, Serb-dominated northern part of city, after a grenade explosion in the area the previous evening.
A spokesman for the French forces, who form the majority of the peacekeeping contingent in the northern city, said four Serbs and two ethnic Albanians had been detained after the blast, which had caused no injuries or material damage.
Ethnically divided Mitrovica has been the scene of several clashes over the past two months. At least nine people have been killed and scores wounded, including two French soldiers. Mitrovica is home to the only major urban population of Serbs left in Kosovo since hundreds of thousands fled reprisals from the ethnic Albanian majority after NATO bombing last year drove Serbian security forces out of the Yugoslav province.
Monday's operation began at around 6 a.m. and lasted for around three hours, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Chanliau, a spokesman for KFOR's French-led northern military sector, said. KFOR has searched Little Bosnia and other parts of the city several times in the past couple of months but Monday's finds showed serious weaponry remains in Mitrovica or can be smuggled in. Chanliau said the seizures were still an achievement. "We seized some very dangerous weapons,'' he said. The rocket launchers were found in the garden of a ruined home and the machine-gun in an empty house, he added. No arrests were made.
A crowd of Serbs gathered in the area during the searches but later dispersed and the operation passed off without incident, KFOR said.
KFOR said the search operation Monday was not part of the process of creating a high-security "confidence zone'' around the city's two main bridges over the Ibar River, which divides Mitrovica into Serb and Albanian-dominated areas. KFOR has been establishing the zone, complete with extra checkpoints and barbed wire, over the past few weeks.