PRISTINA, Nov 24: Twenty-one Nato soldiers were wounded overnight, one seriously, when Serbs in Kosovo fought with peacekeepers trying to remove barricades erected against the country's ethnic Albanian authorities, the alliance said on Thursday.

It was the latest spasm of violence in a months-long standoff in the mainly Serb north of Kosovo that Western diplomats say could cost Serbia official candidate status for membership of the European Union when the bloc meets next month.

Kosovo, where 90pc of the 1.7m people are ethnic Albanians, declared independence from Serbia in 2008. But Serbs in a small slice of the north bordering Serbia reject the secession, and the West has struggled to tackle the country's de facto ethnic partition.—Reuters