The international organisation overseeing a shaky truce in Kosovo has said its peace mission is in jeopardy as fresh violence flared in the southern Serb province yesterday.
Both Serbs and ethnic Albanians were reported to be fleeing their homes in northern Kosovo, where around a dozen people have been killed since fighting broke out there on Thursday.
"If the bloodshed and violence escalate the OSCE will have to reconsider the forms of its activity in Kosovo," a spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in a statement.
Serbian troops pounded the village of Obranca with large calibre weapons and heavy machine-guns, apparently aiming at separatist rebels who killed a local Serb on Saturday.
A Reuters correspondent saw Serb policemen taking defensive positions in the snow in front of the house of the late Milovan Radojevic (74), just before a procession was to set off for the graveyard in a neighbouring town.
The ethnic Albanian-run Kosovo Information Centre (KIC) reported that Serbian forces had also renewed their attack on the nearby village of Lapastica, the scene of fierce clashes between the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas and Serb security forces last week.
The Serb-run Media Centre reported that in another incident yesterday three Serbian policemen were wounded when they came under KLA fire after going to the aid of a Serb farmer who was shot earlier in the day in the village of Velika Reka, in the Podujevo region.
Two police cars were hit and the police returned fire, the report said. A spokesman for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) later confirmed the report.
The Media Centre also reported that a large group of armed Albanians tried to cross into Yugoslavia near the southern town of Prizren late on Saturday, but were turned back by fire from Yugoslav border guards.
The report said that the Albanians were backed up by automatic fire from Albania. No casualties were reported on the Yugoslav side.
It was not immediately clear who started the fighting in Obranca. Two international monitoring teams were in the village during the exchange of fire but refused to talk to reporters after the clashes.
After the fighting abated, some sporadic shots from machine-guns could still be heard in the woods near the town.