BELGRADE (AP) - The head of the UN mission in Kosovo yesterday arrived in Belgrade for talks with Serbian officials on the status of the UN-administered province and protection of its Serb minority. Soren Jessen-Petersen met with Serbia-Montenegro Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic, who rejected independence for Kosovo, according to a statement from his office. Draskovic also demanded protection for the province's Serb minority, a decentralization of Kosovo's powers and guarantees for the return of displaced persons.

BELGRADE (AP) - The head of Serbia's Orthodox Christian Church, Patriarch Pavle, has pulled out of an agreement with the Kosovo government on reconstruction of churches in the UN-run province, the Serb church said yesterday. The Church said in a statement that the patriarch has withdrawn his signature from the Friday deal and declared it invalid after «learning new facts that he had not been familiar with at the time of the signing.» In Pristina, the UN mission said it had not been officially contacted or informed of the withdrawal of the signature.

Three Bosnian Serbs indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY) are in hiding in Russia, while a fourth could surrender to the court in The Hague, a senior Serbian official said on Saturday. «It is known that these three are in Russia,» Jovan Simic, Serbian President Boris Tadic's adviser on relations with the ICTY, told Bosnia's Alternativna television channel. He named the three as Vujadin Popovic, Dragan Zelenovic and either Milan Lukic or a man named Sredoje. (AFP)

Remains of 126 Bosnian civilians, whose bodies were recently exhumed in the northwestern town of Prijedor, where they were brutally killed during the 1992-95 war, were finally laid to rest on Saturday over nine years after the end of the fighting. The remains of 125 Bosnian Muslims and one Bosnian Croat were buried in Prijedor, while some 3,000 relatives and friends paid a last homage. The remains were exhumed from around Prijedor, the scene of a notorious «ethnic cleansing» campaign by Serb forces. (AFP)