Serbia and Kosovo clash at U.N. over explosion

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Serbia and its former province of Kosovo clashed in the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday over who was to blame for an explosion that killed one person in an ethnically divided Kosovo town last week.

The dispute also reopened old fault lines in the council between the West, which broadly supported a 2008 independence declaration by Kosovo's Albanian majority, and Belgrade's long-standing ally, Russia, which opposed it.

Serbian President Boris Tadic, who called the Security Council meeting to discuss last Friday's blast in Mitrovica, which wounded 10 minority Serbs and killed a Bosnian Muslim pediatrician, blamed it on Albanians.

Mitrovica remains divided along the Ibar river between Albanians in the south and some 20,000 Serbs in the north. The blast occurred during a Serb rally to protest the opening of an government office that they saw as representing Albanians.

"Serbs came in peace, yet they were met with unprovoked violence," Tadic said. He said two high-intensity bombs were thrown into the crowd from within courtyards of homes owned by ethnic Albanian supporters of Kosovo independence.

But Kosovo's foreign minister, Skender Hyseni, said Serbs themselves might have been responsible.

Hyseni told reporters that police were investigating the blast, but that based on a conversation he had with Kosovo's interior minister "it is not impossible ... that the explosive device was thrown from within the protesters' groups." He had earlier made a similar charge in a speech to the council.

EU PRESSURE

Hyseni also said the gunshot wounding Monday of an ethnic Serb member of the Kosovo parliament -- a post seen by some Serbs as collaboration with the Albanian authorities -- showed that Belgrade was "misusing and manipulating a number of the Serb community members in Kosovo."

Goran Bogdanovic, Serbia's minister for Kosovo, said on Monday there was no evidence of who was behind the attack on the parliamentarian, Petar Miletic.

Half of Kosovo's 120,000 Serbs live in a region north of the Ibar, which is linked with Serbia by roads. They refuse to accept institutions run from the Kosovo capital, Pristina, and see Belgrade as their capital.

Several Western countries, while voicing no view on who was behind the two attacks, took a pro-Kosovo line in the debate.

In remarks echoed by Hyseni, U.S. envoy Alejandro Wolff said, "We frankly do not see that an isolated criminal act such as the one on July 2 warrants an emergency Security Council meeting." But Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said Serbia was right to bring the matter before the council.

Wolff also said the decision by Pristina to open a citizens' service center in Mitrovica "was the right one." Tadic, however, described the office as illegal and said the international community should ensure it remained closed.

Kosovo guerrillas launched an armed rebellion in the late 1990s, prompting a brutal crackdown by Belgrade's army and police that lasted until NATO bombing in 1999 forced Serbia to withdraw its forces.

Serbia is under pressure from the European Union to take a "more constructive" role on Kosovo if it wants to advance its membership bid, but has vowed never to accept Pristina's declaration of independence.

Serbia has asked the International Court of Justice to rule on the legality of the move. A ruling is expected this month.

(Editing by Paul Simao)