"Don't expect flowers," NATO warns Serb hardliners

PRISTINA (Reuters) - NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo will respond with "all appropriate means" when faced with deadly weapons in Serb protests, a spokesman for the KFOR peacekeeping force said on Wednesday.

"We are not a police force. We don't have the same rules. Don't expect KFOR to send flowers when we are being shot at," KFOR spokesman Col. Jean-Luc Cotard told a news conference in Pristina, capital of newly independent Kosovo.

The NATO-led peacekeeping force of 16,000 bristled at Serb allegations of "brutality" during riots on March 17 in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica, a Serb stronghold and now a bastion against Albanian-dominated independent Kosovo.

Serbia's nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica accused the allied force of turning "snipers and banned weapons" on Serb protesters as they battled over a United Nations court building the Serbs had occupied.

NATO said Serbs hardliners fired automatic weapons and threw grenades and Molotov cocktails during the clash. A 25-year-old Ukrainian U.N. policeman was killed by a grenade and a Serb protester was shot in the head and gravely wounded.

"I make a strict distinction between citizens and murderers," Cotard said. KFOR, in such circumstances, was entitled "to use all appropriate means", he said.

Cotard, a Frenchman, said KFOR had examined an unexploded hand grenade -- one of dozens thrown at the peacekeepers. It was a Yugoslav-made M75, which contains 3,000 "marbles", or prefragmented steel balls.

"It is used to kill people during an assault," he said.

(Reporting by Matt Robinson; writing by Douglas Hamilton; edited by Keith Weir)