(26 Feb 1999) Natural Sound
Tension is mounting in Kosovo as Yugoslav security forces deploy troops and armoured equipment and a group of international monitors are detained at the Serbian province's border with Macedonia.
Eight employees of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe O-S-C-E were forced to spend the night in their cars after being prevented from entering Kosovo, according to a spokeswoman for the O-S-C-E's Kosovo Verification Mission K-V-M.
Serb army and police troops are out in force around the Suva Reka area where the Kosovo Verification Mission K-V-M managed to defuse a potentially violent standoff earlier this week.
A K-V-M monitor said there had been a large build up of Serb troops and artillery, including tanks, armoured personnel carriers.
The area, where the K-V-M managed to persuade ethnic Albanian guerrillas not to attack a police patrol on Thursday, is just a few kilometres (miles) away from Studencane, where fighting erupted on Saturday, forcing thousands to flee their homes.
Sporadic fighting continued for a fifth day around Vucitrn, northwest of the provincial capital Pristina.
Small arms, machine gun and anti-aircraft fire echoed across snow-covered hills.
An aid agency official said four ethnic Albanians had been wounded in Thursday's gunfire exchanges around Bukos.
Hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees fled from Licej, about 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Pristina in the Vucitrn area on Friday.
The United Nations believes at least 4-thousand ethnic Albanians have been driven from their homes by fighting in the hills west of Vucitrn this week.
In a separate incident, two ethnic Albanian civilians were killed and one was wounded during a fire fight between Serb police and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas in a village in southwestern Kosovo, an international monitor said.
He said the shooting erupted when the police walked into the K-L-A-controlled village of Randobrava.
O-S-C-E verifiers who were in the area helped to negotiate an end to the fighting, he said.
In the incident at the border with Macedonia, eight O-S-C-E staff were forced to spend the night in their cars after being prevented from entering Kosovo, according to a spokeswoman for the O-S-C-E's Kosovo Verification Mission.
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