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Thursday, November 23 7:07 PM SGT

Serbian police say Kosovo border area where ambush occurred now calm

VRANJE, Yugoslavia, Nov 23 (AFP) -

Police officials said a buffer zone near the border with Kosovo was quiet early
Thursday following
two days of fighting between Albanian separatists and Serbian police.

But three policemen were still missing and presumed dead after a group of
suspected ethnic Albanian
separatists ambushed a police patrol with mortar, grenade and automatic weapons
fire on Tuesday in
an attack Yugoslav officials warned could rekindle war in the troubled region.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica and a delegation of senior army officers
and other officials
were due to visit the border area later Thursday, Serbian Interior Minister
Stevan Nikcevic told the
Belgrade-based radio B92.

Colonel Novica Zdravkovic, police chief in the region, said no new incidents of
fighting had been
reported overnight around the villages Konculj and Lucane, the scene of the
gunbattle in which five
police were wounded.

Fighting in the area continued for some 24 hours.

The Serbian authorities attributed the attack, and several others in recent
months, to ethnic Albanian
separatists of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) --
three villages
in the border area which is inhabited predominantly by ethnic Albanians.

All the attacks have taken place within the so-called Ground Safety Zone, a
five-kilometre
(three-mile) Belgrade-controlled security zone along the border with Kosovo.

The zone, out of bounds for Serbian army troops and the NATO-led KFOR
peacekeeping force in
Kosovo, is patrolled by lightly-armed Serbian police.

The area has an Albanian population of some 70,000, and the UCPMB is campaigning
for it to be
attached to an independent Kosovo.

Kostunica, a moderate nationalist who replaced hardline Slobodan Milosevic as
Yugoslav president
last month, on Wednesday accused the international community of failing to
ensure security in
Kosovo and the surrounding security zone.

"I note with regret that despite the victory of the democratic forces and our
nation's opening up to
the world, the international community has failed in its obligations regarding
Yugoslavia," he wrote in
a letter addressed to NATO Secretary General George Robertson.

The Yugoslav government, in a statement released on state television Wednesday,
condemned "the
escalation in terrorist acts by Albanian extremists" and warned they risked
"provoking a new war in
the region."