Fire Fight After Federation Police Arrest Looting Serbs
(SARAJEVO, March 29—From Wire Service Reports) Bosnian Federation police clashed with Serbs near Sarajevo on Friday after units of the mainly-Muslim force encountered a gang of Serbs they said were on a looting spree. Sarajevo police chief Enes Bezdrob said his men were shot at with automatic weapons and had grenades lobbed at them after they arrested two Serb civilians stealing windows from houses just within Bosnian government territory.
The shooting occurred near Grbavica, a Sarajevo suburb the Serbs recently handed over to the Muslim-Croat federation under terms of the peace plan, a U.N. official said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, had no further details. In a separate incident, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in Grbavica, wounding two children playing with it; one of them was not expected to survive, the official said.
An angry standoff ensued near Grbavica as crowds of Serbs demanding the release of their kinfolk gathered to confront United Nations police units and Italian NATO soldiers who arrived to try to calm the situation. A Bosnian journalist working for the American news agency, Associated Press, became caught in the crowd and was set upon. Witnesses said he was beaten by enraged Serbs who tried to drag him away before colleagues alerted NATO soldiers to save him.
In a bizarre follow-up the Italians took the journalist from Federation territory and handed him over to Serb police, an action NATO officials were at a loss to explain. The journalist was later released in a hastily arranged swap for the two arrested Serbs who Federation police said they had no objection to releasing.
United Nation police spokesman Alex Ivanko said the Federation explanation for events might not give the whole picture and questioned why some Federation policemen were armed with automatic weapons, which they are not supposed to carry. "We're not yet clear what really happened," said Ivanko. There were no casualties in the incident in which, Bezdrob protested, armed and uniformed Serbs appeared from nearby buildings to attack his policemen.
He said he had asked NATO to clear the armed Serbs from Federation areas where they are forbidden. The clash occurred in an area where the boundary line between the Muslim-Croat federation and the Bosnian Serb republic cuts a strategic hill top road that links Serb communities. NATO officials said the incident was a debacle that illustrated how high tensions remained along boundary lines around the city.
"It's really stupid allowing ourselves to get back into the situation where exchanging people becomes the best way to solve problems,'' said one NATO source.
Berserkistan is a world news service of Michael Linder Productions, Inc.
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