US Marines come under fire

No US troops were injured in the clash, which occurred Wednesday at 4 pm GMT at the village of Zegra, two kilometers south of the town of Gnjilane in southeastern Kosovo, said Craddock.

8220;It is over and there are no Marines that have been hurt,8221; said Colonel Richard Bridges, a Pentagon spokesman.

One of the attackers was killed, two were wounded and one was detained, Bridges said. Earlier, Craddock had said two assailants were killed.

The Marines were manning a checkpointin the village when they came under fire, Craddock said in a telephone conference call from Kosovo with Pentagon reporters. They returned fire at the assailants, who holed up in a complex of buildings, he said.

Backed by AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, Marines surrounded the attackers, and tried to persuade them to surrender, he said.

Few details were available on how the standoff ended and it was unclear whether any of the assailants escaped.

A statement released by the US forces in Kosovo said the attackers reportedly were wearing civilian clothes, and their motives and identities were unknown and under investigation.

The shoot-out at the Marine checkpoint was the third clash involving US troops since the deployment of the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force.

US troops were shot at Monday night upon entering a village to investigate fires that they had seen from a distance, Craddock said. Two people were captured by the soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, he said.

8220;They did not claimaffiliation one way or the other. We8217;re still investigating who they are,8221; Craddock said.

A third attack on US troops took place late Wednesday in the town of Vitina, south of the Kosovo capital of Pristina.

US Army Sergeant Brent Hickman said that his squad fired a few shots from their automatic rifles after two 10-round bursts of automatic weapons fire whizzed over their heads in a residential area.

The ethnic Albanians or Serbs, whoever was attacking them, had the advantage since they knew the streets and alleyways by heart, specialist Jason Sivells told AFP.

In Washington, General Eric Shinseki, the US Army8217;s new Chief of Staff, said one of the chief risks facing the 4,500 US troops in Kosovo as peacekeepers were radical forces outside of normal chains of command.

8220;There is always a radical element in any of these situations whether KLA or other stay behinds,8221; he said.

8220;The tough business now is even-handed treatment of all the factions and that8217;s what gives you the leverage to enforce onall counts, against all the former warring factions,8221; said Shinseki, a former commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia.

Craddock said US forces are still encountering illegal checkpoints despite a demilitarization agreement signed by the KLA. 8220;We continue to find those who refuse to follow the instructions that are in the agreement. We8217;ve had to continually over the last day inform all KLA troops of what they had agreed to do and to enforce that,8221; he said.

He said the US forces expected it would take some time before all KLA soldiers got word of what the demilitarization agreement requires, and that a certain percentage would refuse to comply.

8220;So we expected an increase in incidents, a rising trend of incidents, and I think that8217;s what we8217;re experiencing now,8221; he said.