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US Embassy Worker Wounded by Gunmen Near Sarajevo
‘One round hit the woman in the back. Her husband managed to flag down a passing patrol and she was taken to our mobile field hosiptal in Ilidza’
"The woman and her husband were driving back from Kiseljak towards the city when they were fired upon by unknown persons travelling in another vehicle," Colonel Max Mariner, a NATO spokesman in Sarajevo, said. "One round hit the woman in the back. Her husband managed to flag down a passing (NATO) patrol and she was taken to our mobile field hosiptal in Ilidza and then on to the Italian (NATO) hospital in Sarajevo for surgery." "She is reported to be stable and her life is in not in danger," he said.
The U.S. embassy confirmed the broad outlines of Mariner's account and said the victim was a U.S. Foreign Service employee but gave no further details. "We don't know the identity nor the motivation of the assailants and we have no indication that the attack was politically motivated,'' the embssy said in its statement.
Embassy sources said U.S. ambassador John Menzies had visited the victim in the hospital. Kiseljak is a Croat-dominated town about 16 miles northwest of Sarajevo. Both lie within Muslim-Croat federation territory which comprises 51 per cent of Bosnia.
Several U.S. government employees have been killed and injured in Bosnia, mainly in accidents rather than by hostile fire. U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and several of his department's employees were killed when their plane crashed in poor weather outside Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April. Several U.S. diplomats died in an accident on a mountain road outside Sarajevo last summer.
The United States is concerned that Islamic fighters who came to fight for the Bosnian government during its 43-month war who still remain in the country could pose a threat to American soldiers and diplomats. Kiseljak has a reputation as a trading town with strong connections to Muslim, Croat and Serb criminal elements.
Were Friday's attack to prove to have been the result of a deliberate attack on a U.S. diplomat it would mark a serious deterioration in the security climate in Bosnia with possible long-term implications for the international presence.
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SARAJEVO, July 13 (Reuters) - An American woman working for the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo was wounded when gunmen opened fire on her car northwest of the city, NATO said Saturday.
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