Leading Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic was killed on Tuesday in a drive-by shooting as he arrived at his party headquarters, his lawyer and a party official said.

"I am informed that he was shot dead on the spot and efforts to revive him at Mitrovica hospital were unsuccessful," lawyer Nebojsa Vlajic told AFP.

Ivanovic, 64, was considered a moderate politician in the ethnically divided flashpoint town of Mitrovica.

Despite security checks at the entrance on Friday, Kosovo opposition lawmakers used tear gas again to prevent work in the Parliament and to pressure the government into renouncing deals with Serbia and Montenegro.

The session, delayed for about 50 minutes, was temporarily suspended on Friday after a tear gas canister was launched from opposition lawmakers' seats. A resumed session an hour later was suspended again for the same reason.

Nestling in a wooded valley that its citizens laid their lives down to defend, the town of Kacanik in southern Kosovo is fiercely proud of its war dead. Well-kept cemeteries include nearly 100 victims of Serb-led ethnic cleansing in 1999, while in the town centre, a statue clutching an RPG honours fallen members of Brigade 162 of the Kosovan Liberation Army.

Kosovo has lost an estimated 50,000 people in the past two months ­ most of them on buses bound eventually for Germany. What is going on in this tiny corner of the Balkans?

Nysret Ismaili surveys the small group of children playing on the flinty school football pitch, set in the plains below Kosovo’s rolling hills, and knows he has a problem.