PALE, Bosnia -- UN officials in Sarajevo on Thursday condemned a Serb air raid on the UN "safe area" of Bihac in northwestern Bosnia, saying the special envoy to former Yugoslavia, Yakushi Akashi, was "gravely concerned."


The officials reported 14 wounded in Wednesday's missile attack and related shelling, as well as extensive damage in the city. One UN official called the air attack "unprecedented."


Bosnian Serb representatives meanwhile, during a debate on the imposition of martial war, haggled over how much power to relinquish to their leader Radovan Karadzic to wage war against government forces and their Croat allies.


Although Bosnian Serbs launched the war in April 1992 to block Bosnia's secession from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, Karadzic seeks a formal war declaration so that he can impose martial law, make certain decisions without the assembly's approval and impose long prison terms.


While a formal state of war was expected to be declared Thursday, sources said Karadzic would probably be allowed to take decisions only when the assembly was unable to convene and for a limited time.


In the wake of Wednesday's air attack on Bihac, the mood at the United Nations was somber. "We are extremely concerned by the use of air power, the first since early months of the war in former Yugoslavia," Thant Myint-U, a UN spokesman in Sarajevo, said of the Bihac attack.


Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, another UN spokesman, said the Serb fighter bomber involved in the incident may have violated the UN's "no-fly zone" over Bosnia. The plane took off from Udbina, an airfield in Serb-held Croatia about 30 kilometers southwest of Bihac, and was spotted firing while either on the Bosnia-Croatian border or just inside Bosnia, he said.


NATO could not confirm from radar reconnaissance whether the plane crossed into Bosnian airspace for the attack, said an alliance spokesman, Captain Jim Mitchell. Nonetheless, the attack was a clear violation of Bihac's status as a UN safe area.