Unidentified gunmen fired warning shots over a patrol of French troops investigating an arson attack on two Serb owned barns in northern Kosovo, a military spokesman told AFP Sunday.
"The shots were fired to intimidate, over the heads of the troops, but they could have easily have fallen on them," Captain Herve Sandel said.
The peacekeepers, in two light vehicles, had been called at 8:30 PM (1930 GMT) Saturday to the outskirts of Banja, a Serb village just to the north of the Drenica valley, a stronghold of ethnic Albanian guerrilla activity.
Near the burning buildings, the troops saw two men, believed to be armed with assault rifles, who fired a volley of shots before making their escape, Sandel said.
The French, soldiers serving with Kosovo's NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force, did not fire their own weapons and none of the patrols were hurt in the incident, he added.
Sandel branded the gunmen "extremists" and said their actions were designed to destabilise the "delicate co-existence" between Kosovo's rival Serb and ethnic Albanian communities.
Saturday was the day of Serbia's legislative elections, in which many Serbs in the breakaway province voted, provoking some small street protests from Kosovo Albanians who reject Yugoslav sovereignty.
Kosovo's Serb minority has been the victim of a series of ethnically motivated attacks since KFOR and the United Nations took over the running of the province after a NATO bombing campaign forced Belgrade to abandon a campaign to put down an armed separatist uprising.
Recent weeks have also seen an upsurge in tension between Serbs and the international administration, and two UN police stations in Serb-majority areas of northern Kosovo have been attacked -- PRISTINA (AFP)
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