At least 32 people have died and about 500 been injured in the violence in this UN-administered Serbian province, where about 80,000 Serbs live amid a predominantly Albanian population.

The violence led to the torching of mosques and medieval churches, and some Serbs said they had been given 10 minutes to leave their homes or die.

Hospitals were overflowing with dead or wounded, including 61 NATO peacekeepers, three of whom were reported to be seriously hurt.

The violence began after a Serb teenager was shot and injured in a village south of the capital Pristina on Monday, and three Albanian children were said to have drowned after being chased into a river by Serbs in Kosovska Mitrovica on Tuesday.

In the tinderbox atmosphere, authorities did not dare allow funerals of two of the children whose bodies have been found.

Three explosions rocked Kosovska Mitrovica on Friday – the first a controlled blast by NATO peacekeepers and the others of as yet unknown origin. NATO troops encircled an ethnic-Albanian part of the city where the blasts occurred.

About 400 French troops were due to fly into Pristina airport later Friday from their base in Toulouse, bringing the French contingent in northern Kosovo to roughly 3,000 soldiers.

An advance party of 150 British soldiers landed in Pristina early Friday and 600 others were to arrive in the next three days.

German Defence Minister Peter Struck also announced that his country was to send 600 extra soldiers to Kosovo to help contain the upsurge of inter-ethnic fighting in the Serbian province, announced Friday.

Smaller numbers of Italian and US soldiers also were being sent to the province.

The violence has all but buried Western hopes that the province's Serb and majority ethnic-Albanian population could live in harmony.

"The Serbs burned down a mosque in Nis and elsewhere and today we've exacted revenge on the Orthodox churches," Said Ramadan Smajli, an Albanian, as he watched late Thursday the flames lick what was left of four medieval churches burning in Prizren, where Serbs are now a tiny minority among the 80,000 ethnic-Albanian residents.

The Serbian Orthodox church said 16 Orthodox churches and monasteries, many of them considered medieval architectural gems, have been destroyed, ending a long local tradition of sparing religious edifices.

In several other towns in the province, Serbs reported being forced from their homes under threat of death.

"You've got 10 minutes to leave or you'll be killed," Nikola Stolic, a resident of Obilic, northwest of the capital Pristina, recounted after being evacuated by KFOR troops from the NATO-led multinational force stationed in Kosovo.

He said hundreds of fellow Serb residents of the town joined in the exodus after extremist Albanians entered the town.

"We just had time to recover our papers," he told

AFP by telephone. "More than half of the Serb homes were already on fire when KFOR troops, who couldn't stop the Albanians, started evacuating us. We barely escaped a certain lynching."

The government of the Serb-run entity in Bosnia said it was urgently sending supplies of humanitarian aid to fellow-Serbs in Kosovo.

Senior military officials said the fighting seemed premeditated.

"The wave of violence set off by the Albanians hasn't shown signs of calming down. I believe they've been ready for some time to lay waste to Kosovo," General Alberto Primicerj told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

NATO's military commander for southeastern Europe, Admiral Gregory Johnson, said the fighting seemed to have been "orchestrated".AFP