Kosovo's parliament voted to change the constitution on Monday and create a war crimes court, which the West wants to try ethnic Albanian former guerrillas for alleged war crimes including organ harvesting.

The vote was held just one month after parliament first tried to approve the creation of the court, seen by many Kosovo Albanians as an attempt to tarnish their 1998-99 guerrilla war against Serbian rule.

The constitutional changes were endorsed by 82 deputies in the 120-seat parliament.

Lawmakers in Kosovo on Friday rejected Western pressure to create a special court to try ethnic Albanian ex-guerrillas for alleged crimes including organ harvesting during a 1998-99 insurgency to throw off Serbian rule.

The parliament vote, which fell five votes short, represents a major snub to Kosovo's chief financial and political backers in the United States and European Union, which have lobbied hard for the young country to address the accusations.

Kosovo's prime minister has called his Slovenian counterpart to ask for the release of a Kosovar opposition leader and former guerrilla commander detained on Wednesday on a war crimes warrant issued by Serbia.

The arrest of Ramush Haradinaj, who served briefly as prime minister of Kosovo in 2004-05, has infuriated Kosovars, many of whom consider him a hero for his role in fighting Serbian forces during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

PRISTINA: The International Monetary Fund and Kosovo have agreed the terms of a 22-month standby loan worth some 185 million euros ($209 million), an IMF official said on Tuesday.  "Kosovo has no financial crisis, no fiscal crisis, but this deal will help Kosovo with its economic growth," IMF mission chief Jacques Miniane told a news conference. 

European Union judges in Kosovo sentenced 11 former Kosovo Albanian guerrillas, two of them close to ex-prime minister Hashim Thaci, to prison terms on Wednesday for war crimes committed during Kosovo's 1998-99 pro-independence uprising.

In two parallel trials, judges from the EU police and justice mission said atrocities were committed against Kosovar civilians held in a camp run by the then-Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which fought Serbian security forces in the war.

Thousands of people turned out in Kosovo's capital on Tuesday to pay their respects to eight ethnic Albanian militants killed earlier this month in neighboring Macedonia, whose government labeled them as terrorists.

Eight Macedonian policemen and 10 Albanian militants, nine of them from Kosovo, were killed in a day-long battle in the northern Macedonian town of Kumanovo on May 9. It was the country's most serious violence since Western diplomacy pulled it back from the brink of civil war in 2001.

One crew member was injured when a European Union helicopter crashed at Kosovo's international airport on Tuesday during a training flight, the airport said in a statement.

A spokesman for NATO's Kosovo mission had earlier said several people were hurt in the accident, the cause of which was not known. The airport said it would reopen to flights later in the day.

PRISTINA (Reuters) - A prosecutor in Kosovo indicted 32 people on Thursday for fighting alongside Islamist insurgents in Syria and Iraq and recruiting others from the impoverished Balkan country to fight.

Security officials say more than 200 people from Kosovo have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, stirring fears of the threat they might pose when they come home. More than 30 are believed to have been killed.

Europe and the United States urged Kosovo on Tuesday to create a special court to investigate allegations of organ harvesting by ethnic Albanian guerrillas, saying failure would allow Serb-ally Russia to take up the cause at the United Nations.

The West wants an ad hoc tribunal, created by Kosovo but located in the Netherlands, to address allegations contained in a 2011 report by the Council of Europe that members of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) removed and sold organs from Serb captives during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

Serbia has informed its former province of Kosovo that Foreign Minister Hashim Thaci will be arrested if he tries to attend a conference in Belgrade this week in what would have been a landmark visit by the former guerrilla commander.

Thaci is invited to a civil society event on regional reconciliation in the Serbian capital on Friday. He had said he hoped to attend.

The prospect put Serbia's government in an awkward spot.