A Kosovo mayor belonging to the party of moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova was shot dead Tuesday in the center of Klina in the northwest of the UN-run province, police said.
Ismet Raci, 50, was hit by several bullets as he was walking down the stairs of his apartment block in the town centre, said UN police spokesman Barry Fletcher.
Kosovo's UN administrator, Hans Haekkerup, said he was "outraged" by the attack on the local leader.
The killing was not the first murder of loyalists of the veteran pacifist leader Rugova, elected Kosovo's "president" during unofficial polls held among the province's ethnic Albanian majority after Belgrade scrapped the area's autonomy in 1989.
On November 23, Mustafa Xhemajl, Rugova's political advisor and co-founder of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), was gunned down on the stairs of his building less than a month after his party won a resounding victory in municipal polls.
In the run-up to those elections, the LDK was often the target of violent attacks and intimidation blamed on ethnic Albanian extremists -- PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AFP)
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