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Serb with Grenade, Ambush of French, in an Edgy Bosnia
‘Utterly random and motiveless attacks’
Patrik Svensson, a spokesman for the International Police Task Force (IPTF) in postwar Bosnia, said an alert receptionist in the IPTF building grabbed the Serb man to prevent him from detonating the grenade when he entered on Friday night.
"An IPTF duty officer who is fluent in the local language rushed to the scene and talked the subject into giving the grenade to the receptionist," Svensson told a news briefing. "The (Serb) mentioned that he wanted to go to prison," he said. The man was handed to Bosnian Serb police early on Saturday and the grenade confiscated.
In another incident involving NATO-led peace forces, a lone gunman fired on a French patrol near Muslim-controlled Visoko, 30 km (18 miles) north of Sarajevo, just before dawn on Saturday.
Lieutenant Colonel Max Marriner, spokesman for the peace Implementation Force (IFOR), said one French soldier had suffered a minor gunshot wound to the upper arm. "The patrol did not return fire. There was no obvious motive or warring faction involvement in what seems to be, on the face of it, an utterly random and motiveless attack,"
Marriner told reporters. He said an investigation had begun.
Two Muslim civilians who peppered a Czech armoured IFOR patrol vehicle with sub-machine gun fire in a demilitarised zone in northwest Bosnia on Friday have been turned over to local police, Marriner said.
Shooting attacks or other violence against members of the 53,000-strong IFOR have been very rare since it deployed last December to enforce the 1995 Dayton peace treaty. IFOR separated and demobilised Serb, Croat and Muslim armies without incident. Non-NATO weapons are banned from former confrontation zones under a demilitarisation regime. |
SARAJEVO, July 27 (Reuters) - A drunken Bosnian Serb clutching a grenade burst into the U.N. police monitors' headquarters in the northern town of Banja Luka but was subdued without casualties, the United Nations said on Saturday.
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