Three Serb police officers were killed yesterday when their vehicle hit two anti-tank mines in a buffer zone next to the Kosovo boundary, Serbian officials said.
The explosions were the latest episode in the sporadic violence which has gripped the Presevo Valley area of southern Serbia since an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group emerged more than a year ago to fight Serb security forces.
The blasts also came just two days after seven Serbs were killed and dozens wounded in northern Kosovo when a bomb exploded underneath the bus in which they were travelling.
Reporters taken to the scene of the landmine blasts saw charred bodies, a vehicle completely blown apart with fragments scattered up to 200 metres away and two identical craters, about 1.5 metres deep and 2.5 metres wide.
The police vehicle was delivering supplies to other officers in the buffer zone on Sunday morning when it ran over the anti-tank mines near the village of Lucane, officials said.
"It all happened in a completely peaceful situation, without any shooting going on," the Serbian Interior Minister, Mr Dusan Mihajlovic, said.
An EU observer at the scene said he could confirm that a jeep "probably hit two anti-tank mines, and three people are definitely dead. It's too early to have any ideas about who put the mines here or why, other than the obvious conclusions," said the official, Mr Alex McKenzie Smith.
Guerrillas operating in the area say they are fighting Serbian repression of the substantial ethnic Albanian population in the Presevo Valley. Serbian officials, however, have branded them terrorists whose only goal is to join the area to ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo.
NATO, anxious to bolster Serbia's new democratic rulers, has called on the rebels to lay down their arms and given cautious backing to a Serbian peace plan.
On Thursday it said the alliance was prepared to discuss changes to the Ground Safety Zone, the 5km-wide strip on the Serbian side of the boundary in which currently only lightly armed Serbian police are allowed.
The zone was set up after NATO bombing drove Serbian forces out of Kosovo in 1999 to end repression of ethnic Albanians. It was created to keep a safe distance between NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo and the Yugoslav army and Serbian special police.
However, the de facto security vacuum has been exploited by the so-called Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB), which has gained control of more and more of the zone since it emerged in January last year.
The killings bring the number of Serbian police killed since the fighting began to at least 11. The guerrillas say nine of their fighters have been killed.