A relief convoy driver was killed and a second driver was wounded after Bosnian Serbs fired on U.N. trucks carrying food Tuesday into the Muslim enclave of Gorazde.
In reaction to the Serbian attack on the relief convoy, the British commander of the military escort requested close air support - a term for NATO action that could include airstrikes, a U.N. spokesman said.The request was turned down.
Maj. Koos Sol said top military and civilian officials at U.N. headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia, decided against approving air action on grounds that it was too late - the attack occurred several hours earlier, dark-ness was falling and there was no identifiable target.
Kris Janowski, spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said the attack occurred along the front line near Ilovaca, a village 12 miles southwest of Gorazde. Food that already had been delivered to the Gorazde pocket was being distributed to outlying areas.
He said the dead and wounded drivers were both Bosnians.
At least one of two British armored vehicles escorting the convoy of six or seven trucks returned fire, but it was not immediately known if the shots struck any attackers, Janowski said.
It was the first shooting death of a UNHCR driver since January, when a British driver was killed in government-held territory near Zenica.
The enclave, scene of Serb attacks last April that killed dozens, is surrounded by Serb forces that have obstructed many convoys to the Gorazde
area. In Sarajevo, furious U.N. officials demanded the immediate return Tuesday of a kidney dialysis machine and other medical supplies stolen from another relief convoy by Bosnian Serbs.