Macedonia has declared its latest offensive against ethnic Albanian rebels near the border with Kosovo over, apart from mopping up operations.
"I can tell you with pleasure that the first part of the operation is finished. We have ahead of us just small operations for cleaning up the terrain. especially for mines," said Army spokesman Mr Blagoja Markovski.
"But it is possible that we will see more armed provocations," he told reporters at a daily briefing.
The government also said it had completed an investigation and determined Macedonian forces were in no way to blame for mortar rounds which killed a British television journalist and two ethnic Albanians on Thursday in a Kosovo village.
The statement appeared to ignore NATO's call for a joint investigation. NATO said its inquiry was not complete, but initial crater analysis showed the rounds came from the direction of Macedonia.
Government spokesmen suggested guerrillas had disguised themselves as Macedonian troops to deliberately shell the ethnic kin in order to blacken the name of the Macedonian forces.
They said this was an old trick used in Kosovo to elicit international sympathy and provoke foreign intervention.
Western diplomatic sources said the blanket denial would meet with skepticism as long as NATO's probe was complete.
Apparently ignoring NATO Secretary General Mr Goerge Robertson's call for a joint inquiry in to Thursday's shelling of the Kosovo village of Krivenik, defense ministry spokesman Mr Georgi Trendafilov said: "Our commission has finished its work and confirmed what was already said.
"We rule out any possibility that the cause of the death of the foreign journalist was fire from Macedonian forces... we even rule out the possibility it was done by mistake," he said.
Mr Trendafilov said Macedonian forces had spotted about 30 people wearing Macedonian army uniform "that were not our soldiers," on the Kosovo side of the border.
He said they were the probable origin of the mortar fire. An Army spokesman asserted that Macedonian mortars did not have the range to have carried out the attack - a claim that raised eyebrows among NATO military sources.