Subject: Elderly Kosovo Serb murdered, wife badly injured
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2000 12:40:18 PST
From: C-afp@... (AFP)
Organization: Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
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PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Dec 29 (AFP) - A gang dragged an elderly
Serb couple from their Kosovo home and slashed their throats,
fatally injuring the husband in an apparently ethnically motivated
attack, the province's UN administration said Friday.
Dragan Rapaic and his wife Vukosava, thought to be in their 60s,
were attacked late Thursday in their home in the village of Colonia
near the ethnically-mixed central Kosovo town of Obilic, a statement
said.
Mrs Rapaic, who was being treated Friday in a hospital in
Kosovksa Mitrovica, told UN police that four men speaking Albanian
had attacked the couple with knives and left them injured in the
street.
The couple had been sharing a duplex house with an Albanian
couple "without incident", the UN statement said.
Attacks on Kosovo Serb minority gave been commonplace since the
United Nations took over the running of the southern Yugoslav
province of Kosovo in June last year, after a NATO-led peacekeeping
force arrived in the province.
Bernard Kouchner, Kosovo's chief UN administrator who is
currently on holiday in his native France, reacted with fury to the
latest attack.
"The attacks on Serbs and other minorities cannot continue if
the people of Kosovo ever hope to count on the support of the
international community," he said, the statement said.
"It will take all of us some time to recover from this shameful
moment in Kosovo's history."