A special Kosovo police unit fired on a vehicle that failed to stop at a checkpoint near the northern city of Mitrovica on Monday, injuring one of the Serb occupants.
Officers of the Rosu special unit opened fire for their own protection after the car did not follow orders to stop and then rammed a police vehicle, a statement from Kosovo police in the capital Pristina said.
Despite being fired upon, the two people in the car escaped from the scene.
The checkpoint, located not far from the border with Serbia, had been set up to thwart smuggling operations and other criminal activities, police said.
In Belgrade, the Serbian government's office for Kosovo affairs said that one of the occupants of the vehicle was seriously injured by the gunfire and taken to the hospital in the Serbian city of Kraljevo.
A second passenger was not injured, and there were no other people in the vehicle, it said.
Kosovo, which has been independent since 2008, is now almost exclusively inhabited by ethnic Albanians. Serbia does not recognize the statehood of its former province and claims the territory of Kosovo for itself.
Tensions between Serbs and Albanians, especially in the north around the divided city of Mitrovica, have been fuelled by Belgrade. At the end of 2022, militant Serbs erected barricades in a dozen places in northern Kosovo, blocking access routes to border crossings to Serbia.
