960428

Bomb kills child

in Serbia's province

PRISTINA, (Yugoslavia): A bomb killed an ethnic Albanian child and injured three more Saturday in Serbia's tense southern province of Kosovo at the end of a week which saw six other people, five of them Serbs, killed in worsening ethnic strife.

The bomb which killed Nexhat Hetemi, 12 and injured his three companions aged between nine and 12, was thrown from a car which sped through the village of Velika Reka about 30 kilometres (20 miles) north of here at around 05:30 p.m., the Kosovo Democratic League, the main Albanian opposition party said.

The KDL said another bomb had exploded at dawn Saturday outside the home of Milos Scekic, the Serb police chief in the town of Prizren. Noone was hurt in that blast.

One of boys in Velika Reka suffered severe eye injuries and was rushed to hospital in Pristina where his condition was judged to be critical, nurses at the hospital told AFP.

The two other children were allowed to go home after treatment.

Nexhat Hetemi was burned black by the force of the explosion.

Standing over his son's body, the father Rifat Hetemi said he hoped his son would be "the last victim killed in Kosovo".

"What I arrived at the scene of the blast, the children who were tending sheep beside the road, had already been taken to hospital, he said.

An eyewitness interviewed at the hospital in Pristina, the regional capital, said he heard a loud explosion and saw a plume of black smoke.

"When I got to the spot, I found the children lying on the ground," he said.

Velika Reka is a small village. On one side of the road live the ethnic Albanians and on the other around 60 families of Serb refugees living on a newly built housing estate.

The bombs revived ethnic tensions which had subsided slightly since the murder last Sunday by a Serb of an Albanian student followed the next day by the revenge murders of five Serbs.

Separatist sentiment has remained strong in the province where 90 percent of the population is of Albanian descent since Serbia repealed Kosovo's autonomous status in 1989, provoking angry protests by its population.-AFP