PRISTINA (Reuters) - The bomb which killed three people in Kosovo at the weekend was evidently timed to coincide with the start of peace talks in France, Kosovo Verification Mission chief William Walker said on Monday. "It was no coincidence," Walker said during a visit to the scene of the blast in the centre of Pristina, the provincial capital which until recently has been an island of relative calm in Kosovo‘s year-old conflict. A man, a woman and a teenage girl were ripped apart by the powerful blast outside a tiny ethnic Albanian grocery store on Saturday evening, less than an hour after peace talks demanded by the international community began at Rambouillet near Paris. Western powers and Russia are pressing the Yugoslav government to grant Kosovo‘s ethnic Albanian majority a high degree of self-government in a three-year interim deal that could turn the Serbian province into a de facto international protectorate, with NATO troops keeping the peace. NATO succeeded in separating Bosnian forces peacefully after the Dayton accords ended a war there in late 1995. If the allies take on a similar challenge in Kosovo, a campaign of urban terrorism by clandestine groups could pose a serious challenge. No one has claimed responsibility for Saturday‘s explosion. Walker said his mission of international ceasefire observers was still awaiting information from Serbian police investigators on the nature of the explosive device used and any clues to the perpetrators. Walker, a U.S. ambassador, said he brought the Italian state prosecutor to the crime scene to "give him a feeling of what we‘ll be facing".