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Shots fired, car set on fire in ethnic Serb village - Police

Although both Belgrade and Kosovo's Serbs still refuse to recognise the Kosovo government in Pristina, ethnic tensions between Serbs and Albanians have diminished in recent years.

Kosovo police say shots fired, car set on fire in ethnic Serb village

Unknown assailants fired shots at a house and set a car ablaze in an ethnically Serb village in Kosovo on Monday but no injuries were reported, police said, in an attack Serbia's prime minister branded as "disturbing news".

The attack, in which a memorial to Serbs killed during the 1998-99 war was also damaged, highlights tense ethnic relations between Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority and its Serbian minority nearly a decade after independence.

Police in Kosovo's capital Pristina said they were investigating the incident but declined to speculate on the identity or motives of those involved in the pre-dawn attack in the village of Gorazdevac, mainly populated by ethnic Serbs.

"One car was burned and four shots were fired at a house," they said in a statement.

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Gorazdevac is also the site of a 2003 shooting in which two Serb youths were killed and a further four wounded while swimming in a river, but no one was indicted for the attack.

Serbia's Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic described Monday's incident as "bad news, disturbing news".

"This is an attack on all Serbs in Kosovo," Vucic told reporters in Belgrade, adding he would visit Serb enclaves there this week.

Kosovo and Serbia both aspire to join the European Union but must first normalise their relations under the provisions of a 2013 EU-brokered accord. The agreement is key to Belgrade's further progress towards membership of the bloc.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, almost a decade after NATO went to war to halt the killings and expulsions of ethnic Albanian civilians by Serbian forces trying to crush an insurgency.

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