Seven people were killed and more than 250 were injured as battles with firearms, hand grenades, rocks and fists erupted between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo after three Albanian children were pushed into a fast-flowing river and drowned. Eleven French soldiers in the multinational NATO force in Kosovo known as KFOR were injured, three of them seriously, as they attempted to reestablish order in the divided city. The fighting in the city broke out when ethnic Albanians forced KFOR checkpoints and pushed into the Serbian quarter of Kosovska Mitrovica, amid a hail of stones and gunshots. KFOR troops and UN police tried to keep the two sides apart with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. "There are many wounded. The ambulances are coming and going without cease," said a UN spokesman, Gyoergy Kakuk. Medical sources said five ethnic Albanians and two Serbs were killed and that about 200 Albanians and 60 Serbs had been injured. Kosovo Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi, who visited the injured in the southern part of Kosovska Mitrovica, appealed to NATO and the UN to restore calm. The fighting swirled around a bridge over the swift-flowing Ibar river, which runs through this town of 80,000 people, where the ethnic-Serb majority has regrouped in the north and the ethnic Albanians, including many driven from their homes in the north, live in the south. The city has been repeatedly shaken by violence and assassinations, and the ethnic Serb minority has demanded greater protection from Serbia and the international force, which has kept the peace since the end of the Serbia-Kosovo conflict in 1999, after 78 days of NATO bombing forced Serbia to end its brutal ethnic cleansing. Tensions had reached flashpoint as a rumor spread that ethnic Serbs had pursued three Albanian children, aged 9, 11 and 12, and pushed them into the Ibar river where they drowned. Fighting also erupted in Caglavica, just outside the provincial capital Pristina, where KFOR troops Wednesday struggled to keep Albanians apart from Serbs blocking the main road to Macedonia. An AFP photographer said Serbs were fleeing the village, where two Serb homes had been torched. Tensions in Caglavica flared after the shooting and injuring on Monday of a Serb teenager. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Kosovar Albanian protesters carry a seriously injured protester, after clashes broke out between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs in the suburbs of Kosovo's capital Pristina, near the village of Cagllavica, Wednesday , March 17, 2004. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)