BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- NATO downed a Yugoslav MiG-29 fighter jet and struck a military airfield, hydraulics factory and a local TV station Tuesday, showing no letup in the bombings.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said a U.S. Air Force F-16 shot down a Yugoslav MiG-29 in an air confrontation that reportedly took place over the Bosnia-Serbia border.At NATO headquarters, Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz of the German air force confirmed that an allied aircraft intercepted and shot down a Yugoslav aircraft, but he did not provide other details.
While Yugoslav aircraft have been struck on the ground at various Serbian and Montenegrin airports -- even seen hiding under the tails of large commercial airplanes -- the Yugoslav air force has avoided confrontations with NATO warplanes for much of the air war.
On the third day of the conflict -- March 26 -- American F-15C jets shot down two Yugoslav MiG-29s after they entered the air space of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Most traffic lights were still out Tuesday and many residents in Belgrade spent a second night in darkness, meanwhile, due to a power grid crippled by NATO bombings. Power was restored in some parts of the capital today, only to go out again.
Work crews had struggled Monday to restore electricity to much of Yugoslavia after NATO targeted two major power grids late Sunday. Power rationing was imposed in the central Serbian city of Kragujevac.
British Air Marshal John Day said the main focus of the latest operations were the Serb army and police forces in the field in Kosovo, including attacks on tanks, artillery and military vehicles. Allied firepower also struck fuel storage facilities and bridges.
Yugoslav media reported that a NATO missile hit a bus Monday in Kosovo, killing 20 people and injuring 43. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea denied the accounts, saying Tuesday that NATO commanders had checked all gun cameras from planes operating in the area and interviewed all pilots.
"We can find no evidence of any involvement in this incident," Shea said.
NATO officials didn't specify who might be responsible for the attack but said the bus was traveling in an area known for heavy skirmishes between Yugoslav forces and the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army.
NATO launched airstrikes against Yugoslavia on March 24 after Milosevic rejected a Western peace plan to end the fighting in Kosovo, an ethnic Albanian-majority province of 2 million residents in Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.
More than 675,000 ethnic Albanians have poured out of Kosovo since the airstrikes began -- many forced out by roving bands of Serbs and alleging mass atrocities. Thousands more refugees streamed out to Albania and Macedonia on Monday.
At a U.S. military base in Germany, three American servicemen continued their reunions with their families. The former POWs were given a clean bill of health today after being freed Sunday by Yugoslav authorities following a peace mission by the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Checkups of the soldiers revealed fractured ribs and a broken nose, raising questions about how they were treated during their March 31 capture in disputed circumstances along the Macedonia-Yugoslavia border and imprisonment.