NATO holds line in tense north Kosovo after riots

By Matt Robinson

MITROVICA, Kosovo (Reuters) - NATO troops secured a hostile strip of north Kosovo on Tuesday after Serb riots forced the pullout of U.N. personnel in the most serious challenge to the state since it split from Serbia last month.

Soldiers in infantry vehicles and armoured personnel carriers were positioned at key points in the flashpoint town of Mitrovica, where Serbs bitterly opposed to Kosovo's independence clashed with U.N. police and NATO peacekeepers on Monday.

Bridges over the Ibar river that divides the Serb north from the Albanian south were closed.

The U.N. mission that has run Kosovo since the 1998-99 war said the withdrawal of its police and civilian staff from the Serb stronghold of north Mitrovica was only temporary, but could not say when they would return.

Monday's clashes highlighted the risk of Kosovo's partition along ethnic lines and cast further doubt on the deployment in the north of a European Union police mission intended to take over much of the role of the U.N. administration in Kosovo.

"We will maintain our intention to deploy the mission throughout the territory of Kosovo," the EU's new Kosovo envoy, Pieter Feith, told a news conference.

The violence, sparked by a U.N. police operation to retake a U.N. court seized three days earlier by protesting Serbs, was the worst since Kosovo's 90-percent Albanian majority declared independence from Serbia on Feb 17.

GUNFIRE