SKOPJE Ethnic Albanian guerrillas fired a hand-held rocket launcher at a Macedonian security force patrol on Tuesday but the missile missed its target and no one was seriously injured, police said.

The ambush, in the village of Lisec just outside the mainly Albanian northwestern city of Tetovo, was the first major incident in weeks near the scene of fierce fighting between rebels and government troops in March.

None of the three police and army vehicles in the convoy was seriously damaged by the rocket attack, but one policeman's hand was slightly injured, a police source told Reuters.

"If it had hit they would have been dead," the source said.

A successful ambush last month, also in the Tetovo area, killed eight Macedonian soldiers, triggering riots and a renewed army offensive against the guerrillas after a second attack five days later in the northeast killed two more soldiers.

Macedonia has bombarded nearby rebel-held villages with heavy artillery and helicopter gunships for the past 12 days, although fighting has waned since its main Slav and Albanian parties united in an emergency government at the weekend.

Sporadic explosions have also been reported in the mountains high above Tetovo, where the National Liberation Army (NLA) guerrillas retreated after a government offensive six weeks ago.

The NLA, which seems able to occupy Albanian-majority hill villages at will, has popped up repeatedly throughout the mountains bordering Kosovo since it surfaced in February.

It has links to a similar force over the border in neighboring Serbia, which like the NLA, says it is fighting the Slav majority to win equal rights for ethnic Albanians. But western sources doubt the guerrillas are closely coordinated.