Two people were shot dead over Saturday night in the Kosovo capital Pristina and at least one of them had links to an international organisation operating in the province, officials said yesterday.
The latest killings highlighted the vacuum created when Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo earlier this month, leaving the region without a civilian force to maintain law and order.
Soldiers from the Kfor force are charged both with acting as military peacekeepers and with policing the province until a new Kosovo police force is up and running.
A spokesman for British forces investigating the latest killings said the body of a man and a woman had been found close to a post office in Dardanija, a northern suburb of Pristina.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said one of the victims had previously worked for its Kosovo Verification Mission, which monitored a ceasefire in the province before NATO began its bombing of Yugoslavia.
The law and order vacuum in Kosovo has been exploited by many, including ethnic Albanian refugees returning home and carrying out attacks in revenge for Serb violence against them.
Buildings belonging to Serbs, and also to gypsies accused of collaborating with the Serbs, have been set ablaze and looted across the province.
A major step towards making the region safer is scheduled to begin today when members of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army are to begin assembling for disarmament at locations around the province.
A KLA officer in western Kosovo said he was confident the guerrillas would abide by the agreement and disarm thoroughly.
German troops, meanwhile, reported increasing friction with fighters of the KLA.
In Prizren, southern Kosovo, yesterday, Gen Fritz von Korff, the commander of the German sector, said his men had been led to "a cellar which may have been used for torture." He said three gypsies had shown German troops injuries they had suffered, claiming they had been mistreated in the cellar by KLA members. The general said instruments of torture were found there.
The cellar was in a building occupied by some 130 KLA men, but Gen von Korff said the gypsies said they had been tortured by masked men, making their identification difficult. "Relations with the KLA are fragile," another German officer said. Von Korff said he had decided to impose a five-hour curfew at midnight every night to cut down on the risk of incidents.
A late report last night said ethnic Albanians had burned and looted a Serb village where a mentally-ill Serb woman was allegedly raped and stabbed to death by armed Albanian men in uniform.
The pillaging of Belo Polje was the latest in what a Serbian Orthodox Church leader claimed was a systematic campaign of violence driving out even the few elderly, frail Serbs remaining in the western city of Pec and nearby villages.
Accounts today from bleeding, bruised elderly Serb men and women supported that accusation. Serbs sheltering at a monastery outside the city alleged Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers beat them as they forced them from their homes.
Romania yesterday suspended an air corridor for Russian aircraft flying to Kosovo after a Russian plane deemed to have violated an accord was escorted out of Romanian airspace into Yugoslavia.