PRISTINA (Yugoslavia) Oct 20: Unknown attackers shot dead two Kosovo Albanians linked to a moderate local political leader in the province on Friday evening, the UN and the politician’s party said on Saturday.

UN spokesman Dean Olson said one of the victims in the drive-by shooting was journalist Bekim Kastrati, who worked for Geneva-based daily Bota Sot.

The daily is seen as close to the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), a leading ethnic Albanian party headed by moderate Ibrahim Rugova. Olson named the second person killed in the attack, at around 8pm, as Besim Dajaku and the LDK said he was one of Rugova’s bodyguards.

Olson told Reuters the attackers pulled alongside the vehicle carrying the victims near the town of Srbica, northwest of the provincial capital Pristina, and opened fire.

“It appears about 39 rounds (were) fired. There are two victims confirmed dead,” he said.

A third man was injured in the shooting. He was identified as Gani Geci, a former member of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army which fought Serb forces in the southern Yugoslav province in 1998-99 and disbanded after the conflict.

Olson said the motive for the killing was not yet known.

Province-wide elections are set for November 17 in Kosovo, which was placed under UN-led administration in 1999 after NATO’s 11-week bombing campaign to halt Belgrade’s repression of its ethnic Albanian majority.

Belgrade-based Beta news agency said Rugova’s party had cancelled all its pre-election gatherings scheduled for Saturday and Sunday because of the killing.

In local elections last year, Rugova’s LDK won most votes.

In a separate incident early on Saturday unknown attackers shot at and gravely wounded an employee of the Pristina office of the Serbian broadcaster RTS, an ethnic Serb, Beta said. They fired through the window of his home in the Pristina outskirts.

Many Serbs have registered to vote in the election, although their leaders have not yet decided whether they will advise Serbs, who have been the targets of numerous violent attacks in post-war Kosovo, to go to the polls.

On Tuesday, a building in a southern Kosovo town was wrecked by a blast on Tuesday in what the UN said appeared to be a grenade attack aimed at an LDK office there.

It was the first report of violence against a party since campaigning had begun two weeks earlier.

Voters will elect provisional self-governing institutions, including a 120-seat assembly which will have wide powers, although Kosovo’s UN governor will retain ultimate control.—Reuters