Prizren incident (1999)

On 12 June 1999, two days after the approval of UN Security Council Resolution 1244, Kosovo Force (KFOR) personnel began to arrive in Kosovo to stop further hostilities between ethnic Albanians and Serbs and to coordinate efforts to secure the distribution of humanitarian aid. Arrival of the German troops In the early hours of 13 June about 100 German soldiers arrived in Prizren from Macedonia to secure the city for another 600 incoming troops that entered at afternoon from Albania, to the west. Earlier, a Yugoslav Army outpost at Vrbnica border crossing, recently vacated by 60 soldiers, was looted and vandalized. The German soldiers were received as liberators by the ethnic Albanian inhabitants. One of their first tasks was to separate a crowd of Kosovar Albanian civilians and Yugoslav troops by forming a human line, after the former pelted a convoy of Kosovar Serb civilians leaving the city. There was a tense standoff, but eventually a German officer managed to convince the Serbs to withdraw. ==Shooting incident==

As the German troops drove into downtown, along the Bistrica river, they were met by sniper fire from one of the surrounding hills and some houses; they were also allegedly fired at from a Roman Catholic church. The soldiers took cover and returned fire. A civilian woman was reportedly wounded by the snipers, however this was never officially confirmed, while the German troops moved to defensive positions below the hill. A German fighting vehicle fired a warning burst with a general-purpose Rheinmetall MG 3 machine gun at a passing Yugoslav army truck after a Yugoslav soldier inside brandished an AK-47 assault rifle at a jeering Albanian crowd and fired two shots in the air. shot back. The combined gunfire killed the driver instantly and critically wounded the shooter. A German soldier in the armored carrier was injured in the arm, becoming the first casualty of the overall peacekeeping operation. The shooting lasted 20 minutes. The Germans said that the two individuals in the car, both Serbs, were carrying grenades and semi-automatic weapons. However, there is a Serbian version of this incident, by which the German army committed a war crime by killing two Serbs who were fleeing in front of the angry mob of Albanian civilians and members of the KLA. Two Serbians killed were Žarko Andrijević from Prizrena, doormen u "Kosovo vine company" and Slavko Veselinovic, a refugee from Bosnia, worker of "Electrical dustribution company". Platoon leader Lieutenant David Ferk, who gave the order to fire back, was awarded the Gold Cross of Honour for Outstanding Deeds by German Minister of Defense Rudolf Scharping. ==Aftermath==

The commander of the KFOR brigade in Prizren, General Fritz von Korff said: "Although we may not have everything under control at present, we have enough presence in the town to believe there will be a safe (Yugoslav) withdrawal." He also warned that Prizren was still a "dangerous place". The Prizren incident was subsequently referred to by German troops as "Bloody Sunday". == See also ==