At least 10,000 Kosovan Albanians were killed by Serb forces in a planned campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, British officials said yesterday.
The officials said that preliminary investigations in Kosovo suggested that the Kosovars had not exaggerated their claims about Serb atrocities. "Forensic evidence backs up the eye-witness accounts," said Mr David Gowan, the British Foreign Office's Kosovo war crimes co-ordinator.
The chief UN war crimes prosecutor, Ms Louise Arbour, who yesterday visited the site of a mass killing in western Kosovo, said she was "profoundly moved" by what she had seen.
Ms Arbour toured one of the worst killing fields of the Kosovo conflict just a day after British forensic specialists discovered the bodies of 11 children shot dead at close range in Celine. War crimes investigators said they have exhumed 57 bodies so far from nine separate grave sites in the village, nine miles north-west of Prizren.
"It's not possible to have this kind of experience and not be profoundly moved," Ms Arbour said after visiting the dug-up graves and seeing children's shoes and clothing strewn about the area. "It's just too overwhelming to have the full visual impact."
Ms Arbour, the chief prosecutor for the UN tribunal on war crimes in former Yugoslavia, travelled later to an atrocities site in Vlastica, south-east of Pristina.
It was a sobering visit. Accompanied by Mr Bill Gent, head of the British forensic team, she first walked up a hill and stopped by a grave with pink flowers in a clear plastic tube, where a teenage girl was found buried. Then she continued up the hill and came to a grave, 10 feet by 20, uncovered yesterday by the British.
Eighteen of the 21 bodies found buried there by villagers were women and children; six were under the age of 10, including a two-year-old. Bedding, a child's pair of leather shoes and several shirts still littered the area.
British officials have said all the dead are believed to have come from one family, shot by Serb forces on March 25th or March 26th. The Serbs apparently discovered the villagers hiding in a dry river-bed concealed by trees and shot them, according to officials of the NATO-led peacekeeping force.
According to western diplomats meanwhile the moderate Kosovan Albanian leader Mr Ibrahim Rugova today will make his first trip back to Pristina, the Serbian province's main city, since the end of the Kosovo war. Mr Rugova, who left Yugoslavia for Italy and Germany in early May during the NATO bombing campaign, will fly from Rome to the Macedonian capital, Skopje,
on a special plane early today and travel on to Pristina in the morning.
In an interview with the Italian daily paper La Repubblica he had said that he was making contact with the Kosovo peacekeeping force (Kfor) about providing an escort. He said that the non-violent, those who wanted to build a free Kosovo, "independent, democratic and integrated in Europe", were counting on him.
Asked whether he would take up an offer from the leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Hashim Thaci, to join a new government, he said that "we should not go too fast".
There was an international presence in Kosovo providing security and restoring the province's institutions. "There is no need to complicate things with other structures," he was reported to have said.
On his absence from Kosovo since the war ended last month, Mr Rugova said he wanted to give NATO time to take control of the situation. But he stressed that his party, the Kosovo Democratic League, had "never been absent".
Yesterday, while ethnic Albanian refugees continued to flood back into the province, a NATO spokesman said that an anti-tank mine explosion in Kosovo had killed one person and critically wounded another. It was the latest in an alarming number of deaths from mines in the province.
The blast occurred when the civilians hit the mine while driving along a muddy tract of road in the zone of Kosovo controlled by French peacekeepers, according to the NATO spokesman Mr Jan Joosten.
The accident was "distressing," Mr Joosten said, because the area had been cordoned off for mines, but residents had repeatedly removed warnings and barriers and driven over the road.
With refugees streaming back to their home districts NATO peacekeepers have been endeavouring to spread word about the danger of mines.
At least 27 people have been killed in at least 61 confirmed mine incidents in the past month, according to NATO figures.
The supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, Gen Wesley Clark, meanwhile yesterday urged ethnic Albanians to have faith in Russian troops serving in the Kosovo peace force, despite local hostility towards them.
The ethnic Albanian population "should be very confident" that the Russians "will follow the same rules of engagement" as the rest of Kfor, Gen Clark said after meeting the KLA military commander, Agim Ceku, and Kfor chief, Gen Michael Jackson.
Ethnic Albanians have expressed concern about the deployment of 3,600 Russian troops under Kfor, considering them to be allies of their Serb oppressors.