By
The Associated Press
KRIVENIK, Yugoslavia - Mortar shells slammed into a Kosovo village yesterday just across the border from Macedonia as fighting intensified in an area where Macedonian government forces and ethnic Albanian militants have been clashing.
Two civilians were killed, including an Associated Press Television News producer, and 16 others wounded in the assault on the village of Krivenik, just three-quarters of a mile inside the Kosovo border, NATO and U.N. police said. No peacekeepers were reported injured, said U.S. Maj. James Marshall, a spokesman for U.S. forces in Kosovo.
The attack came as NATO-led international peacekeepers stepped up their patrols along the border with Kosovo, near the area where Macedonian troops were skirmishing with the rebels in the rugged mountains. w
A statement by the U.S. command described the projectiles used in the attack as mortars and said an investigation was under way to determine who fired them and from where.
Both the Macedonian army and the rebels denied that they were responsible for the Krivenik attack. Commander Sokoli, a regional rebel commander, said the insurgents lacked the military capability to strike the village from their positions in Macedonia.
A Macedonian military spokesman, Blagoja Markovski, said the mortar shell that killed the APTN producer "was not fired from the Macedonian side" but that the army was conducting an investigation to be certain.
U.N. officials said 10 shells landed in the village. Cramer said a crater analysis was being conducted to try to determine where the shells came from.
The fighting, heavy at times, continued overnight and into the morning as U.S. and British units with the Kosovo peacekeeping operation reinforced their patrols. They said their role continued to be strictly limited to observing the fighting and intercepting any rebels who strayed across the border.
Kosovo, a province of the main Yugoslav republic of Serbia, has been under U.N. and NATO control since 1999 when the Western alliance used a 78-day bombing campaign to force Yugoslav troops to withdraw from the province and end a crackdown on ethnic Albanians.
The Macedonian government characterized yesterday's clashes as a mop-up effort to drive the insurgents out of the country ahead of talks with leaders of the former Yugoslav republic's ethnic Albanian minority, who are outnumbered by Slavs three to one. But it has refused to negotiate directly with the rebels, whom it considers to be terrorists.
The rebels, who say they are fighting for greater rights and recognition for ethnic Albanians and an end to what they insist is second-class citizen status, threatened to counter the latest government offensive.
Among the dead in the shelling yesterday was APTN producer Kerem Lawton, a 30-year-old British national based in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. He died of shrapnel wounds he suffered when a mortar shell hit his vehicle as he arrived in the village at midmorning.
Sylejman Klokoqui, an APTN cameraman who was working with Lawton but had left the car moments before it was struck, was uninjured.
NATO medics treated Lawton at the scene, then took him by road to Camp Bondsteel, the U.S. military base in Kosovo. He was dead on arrival at the base hospital, said U.S. Capt. Alayne Cramer. She said the medics were unable to fly him out of the area because of sustained fire.
"We are all grief stricken at this loss," said Louis D. Boccardi, president and CEO of The Associated Press. "Kerem's courage and devotion to gathering the story reached beyond any words we can say. We weep with his family and his friends."
A Macedonian soldier was killed and two others injured late Wednesday when their vehicle drove over a land mine near Ramno in contested territory close to the Kosovo border, military sources reported.
In contrast to government claims of victory, the rebels suggest they have merely pulled back and regrouped in the rugged and largely inaccessible hills near Tetovo, Macedonia's second-largest city and the focus of fierce fighting over the past two weeks.
"We have more volunteers," Sokoli said, contending that the rebels were gaining in strength. It was not immediately possible to independently corroborate the claims.
The army launched its mini-offensive Wednesday with the aim of driving the guerrillas out of the northern village of Gracane. Macedonian police at their front lines in Kuckovo, just across a ridge, said the village had been emptied of civilians before the bombardment began.
