British military police are investigating allegations by Kosovars that a four-man patrol removed a sum of money from them at a vehicle checkpoint.
"In the early hours of June 21st in Pristina a vehicle was stopped at a checkpoint manned by a four-man patrol from the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers," said British NATO spokesman Maj Damien Plante.
"Local Kosovo Albanians alleged that the four men in the patrol kept a reasonably large sum of money from them."
Maj Plante refused to disclose the size of the sum of money but said it was half the amount that had appeared in some British media reports - £10,000 in deutschmarks.
"This is immensely serious," said Maj Plante. "The Special Investigation Branch is investigating. We have to treat the accusers credibly, but the accused have denied the accusation."
Kosovars, both Serbs and Albanians, frequently allege unsubstantiated incidents of wrongdoing committed by the 40,000-plus NATO peacekeepers.
"This is the first serious incident we've had," said Maj Plante. "We've had over 25,000 troops through here in the last year." The 2nd Battalion, Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, is the current British infantry battalion stationed in the Kosovan capital, Pristina.
Reuters adds:
International aid agencies that have pulled out of Serb-held areas of Kosovo's flashpoint town of Mitrovica will not return until there are better guarantees for the safety of their staff, a UN spokeswoman said yesterday. "If we were to go back without some kind of explicit agreement then next time we will have somebody killed. It will not just be a matter of somebody being beaten, which we have already seen, said Ms Paula Ghedini of UNHCR.
In less than a year, 90 aid agency vehicles had been damaged and 36 destroyed in Mitrovica in what were clearly co-ordinated attacks, she said. "There is a feeling of impunity among these mobs - they feel they can get away with anything."
The World Food Programme and UNICEF have also closed their offices and pulled back their staff and equipment from northern Mitrovica, as have many private aid organisations, following a series of violent incidents dating back to February.
With Kosovo's ethnic Albanian and Serb communities now living mainly in separate areas, the security situation has gradually improved in recent months. But Mitrovica, 40 km north of Pristina, is inhabited by both groups divided by the Ibar river, across which they watch each other with mutual suspicion.