The shots fired at US and Russian peacekeepers near Kosovo's tense border with Serbia came from a group over the frontier in a demilitarized buffer zone, a US spokesman said Monday.
Unidentified gunmen opened fire Sunday on a NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping patrol after the troops after had destroyed a road used by separatist rebels to smuggle arms out of Kosovo.
The joint US-Russian patrol returned fire.
"Over a three-hour period, during which the patrol was preparing demolition charges to complete their boundary closure mission, they reported distant sporadic gunfire," the same source said in a statement.
"During this time, the patrol saw four to five men with automatic weapons and binoculars observing the patrol's activity for approximately 20 minutes," the statement continued.
"A short while later, the patrol received fire...KFOR soldiers have the right to use necessary and proportional force in self-defense," it said.
The incident is thought to be the first time US and Russian troops, former Cold War foes, have fired jointly in anger at a common enemy, officers in Pristina said.
The KFOR patrol was demolishing a road leading to the rebel held village of Muhovac, inside a three-mile (five-kilometer) wide buffer zone separating NATO-led forces from the Yugoslav army.
Shefket Musliu, who describes himself as the general commander of the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB), told AFP by telephone that he was unaware of the incident and would try to contact commanders in Muhovac to see what had happened.
He said however that he would be "surprised" if the rebels had fired at KFOR troops, and said that the gunmen could have come from another nearby village, inhabited by Serbs.
The UCPMB, which has based itself inside the buffer zone, aims to unite three largely ethnic Albanian municipalities of southern Serbia with Kosovo, which they hope will become independent -- PRISTINA (AFP)
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