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British Commandos Arrest Suspected Separatists In Kosovo
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AFP) - British commandos arrested nine suspected ethnic Albanian separatists and seized a large quantity of guns in Kosovo near the province's tense frontier with southern Serbia, a military spokesman said Sunday.
Major Tim Pierce said that a group of British Royal Marines who had been manning an observation post near the village of Zegra in the south of the U.N.-run province challenged an armed group of men who had come out of Serbia into Kosovo at around 9:00 pm (2000 GMT) Saturday.
"The men threw down their weapons and attempted to escape. There was a hot pursuit and the patrol apprehended nine suspects," Pierce said.
The detained men were wearing camouflage uniforms and carrying two rifles each, he added. A tenth suspect managed to escape.
The catch comes just two days after some 250 British and Scandinavian troops were sent from other areas of Kosovo to the frontier area, which borders on an area of southern Serbia in which ethnic Albanian separatists are fighting government forces.
Last month, a smaller contingent of British peacekeepers was sent temporarily to the border zone, which is normally patrolled by U.S. and Russian troops.
Again they scored an immediate success, capturing an arms shipment and 13 separatists, also two days after their arrival. One of the captured separatists was a local leader, British military sources said.
British officers have been privately critical of their U.S. colleagues' attempts to prevent separatist groups exporting arms and men across the frontier, arguing that the Americans' fear of being drawn into the fighting has made them too cautious when patrolling the border area.
The deployment is the first time the elite Royal Marine Commandos, normally based in Kosovo's capital Pristina, have been sent to the hilly frontier, where their commanders believe their Arctic training will be useful as winter snows set in.
An 800 to 1,500 strong force of ethnic Albanian separtists has seized control of a 200 square kilometer enclave of Serbian territory, mainly inside a three-mile (five-kilometer) wide demilitarized buffer zone.
The buffer was set up under the terms of the 1998 ceasefire deal between NATO and the Yugoslav army, to minimize to chances of clashes between Belgrade's forces and the KFOR peacekeeping force, but it has since become a safe haven for the separatists.
The separatists, fighting under the banner of the self-styled Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB), want Serb forces to leave the majority Albanian Presevo valley and for the region to be annexed to Kosovo, from where they draw much of their support.
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