Serb artillery and tanks pounded rebel positions in northern Kosovo yesterday in a battle a Western monitor said was the longest he had seen in the area.
The battle around Podujevo came as the West moved towards summoning the warring parties to the peace table and the US said it was close to gaining NATO consensus to strike Serbia unless it grants Kosovo maximum autonomy.
Ethnic Albanian residents living around Podujevo abandoned their villages or huddled together in groups as Serb battle tanks, artillery and heavy machine-guns ripped into suspected positions of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) from early morning.
"The unusual thing about this fighting is that it started so early in the day," Mr Andreas Vogel, head of the West's Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) office in Podujevo, said. He added that shooting usually did not start until noon or later.
A local KLA information officer, Mr Ismet Cakiqi in Lapastica, said two elderly men had been wounded in Konushevac. He said that according to KLA sources, about 10 armoured vehicles had left the Serbs' nearby Dumosh military base in the morning, to "take up positions and begin shelling our locations".
It was the fourth time in just over a month that fighting has broken out in the villages around Podujevo.
The West has begun to fear a full-scale conflagration could erupt again, as it did last summer, unless both sides are forced to the peace table immediately.
In the village of Velika Reka, near Lapastica, Mr Faik Hodolli (50) said all of the women and children left two days earlier because of the shooting. "The only people left here now are the men looking after their houses," he added.
Elsewhere in Kosovo, Serbian and ethnic Albanian sources reported shooting in the village of Nevoljane, near Vucitrn, where the kidnapping of five elderly Serbs last week brought a sharp rebuke for the KLA from Mr William Walker, chief of the Western verification mission in Kosovo, before their release.