(Rewrites, with U.N. official quote,background) BELGRADE, April 20 (Reuters) - Police shot dead the leader of a suspected terrorist group in a dawn raid on a disused house in the mainly Muslim area of Sandzak in which two others were wounded, Serbian police said on Friday. A statement said police went to a location near the remote village of Donja Trnava, outside Novi Pazar, after a tipoff that Ismail Prentic, 28, head of a suspected terrorist group, was hiding there. A United Nations official in Kosovo, where Prentic was wanted for firearms offences, said Serb police "believed that he, along with another person, was planning possible suicide bomb attacks on mosques in Novi Pazar". Local media said the three suspects were Muslims belonging to what the media said was a fundamentalist Wahhabi sect. A 59-year-old man was arrested. The practice of Islam in the Balkans has been the subject of a simmering dispute. Bosnian Wahhabi leader Abu Hamza said last year that it had been perverted by communism and needed to return to "genuine Islam". Last November, the row sparked a shooting in the mosque of Novi Pazar. However, there have been no known terrorist attacks in Serbia by Islamist militants against state or Western targets. In the past few weeks, police in the Novi Pazar area have arrested 8 members of a suspected Islamic terrorist group, the official news agency Tanjug reported. On March 17, police found plastic explosives, ammunition, grenades, automatic weapons, and military gear in what they said was a terrorist training camp in mountains near Sjenica. A spokesman for Serbia's special court for organised crime said the case had been declared a state secret and he declined to say where it was being heard, Tanjug said. Friday's statement said police officers were attacked by dogs as they approached the house where Prentic was hiding and then came under attack by grenades and gunfire which injured one police officer. Police opened fire when the group tried to flee. "In response to the attack, the police fired back killing Prentic and injuring Senad Ramovic," the statement said. Doctors said Ramovic, 34, was in stable condition and the injured policeman had already left hospital.
