The 14 Serb villagers killed in Kosovo last week were buried in the village of Gracko yesterday as the international peacekeeping force announced the arrest of at least four people in connection with the massacre.
An estimated 500 people, among them the senior UN administrator in Kosovo, Mr Bernard Kouchner, and senior officials from Serbian ministries sent from Belgrade, attended the ceremony, which was led by the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle.
Friends and relatives wept over the 14 coffins lined up in a playing field in the centre of Gracko, a farming village just south of Pristina which is too small even to have a chapel.
Some cast angry looks at the media group and Kfor soldiers standing a few metres away. Around 100 British soldiers ringed the village, and a helicopter patrolled nearby.
The ceremony came five days after the 14 farmers, aged between 18 and 63, were shot dead while harvesting a field on the outskirts of Gracko. The incident - the worst act of violence since Kfor entered Kosovo on June 12th - has heightened tensions between the Serbian minority living in Kosovo and the peacekeepers tasked with providing security for all the province's communities.
But Kfor says it is giving the massacre its total attention. Lieut Col Robin Hodges from Britain said four people were arrested overnight in raids by British military police on houses near Gracko, and they were helping with inquiries.
Another six people in the vicinity who were arrested overnight at a British Kfor roadblock, in connection with grenade attacks in Pristina and Lipjan, may also be questioned over the massacre, Lieut Col Hodges said. He refused to divulge the ethnic groups of those arrested, but Mr Kouchner, the UN administrator, told journalists they were ethnic Albanians. However, the killers, he said, were still being hunted.
Kfor has refused to speculate on the motive for the attack or the identity of the killers, but posters in the village announcing the funeral showed photographs of the 14 victims and said they were "killed by Albanian criminals".
Addressing the mourners yesterday, a village leader, Mr Stevan Lalic, said: "The people who did this are evil and soaked our fields with blood . . . This is the result of a very, very deep hate." He warned that unless more was done, "there will be more killings".
Patriarch Pavle, accompanied by other senior clerics, blessed each of the flower-strewn coffins before they were placed on a convoy of tractors, which transported them to a nearby cemetery, preceded by cross-bearers. Behind each vehicle shuffled up to 100 mourners, among whom were the Deputy Ministers of the Serbian Foreign and Finance Ministries.
The Finance Ministry official, Mr Stojan Zdravkovic, said that "if the killings continue, the Serbs will leave this land; it's a question of life or death".
Early results of the Kfor investigation into the massacre - which commanders said overshadowed all other operations - are being kept secret for the time being, although some sources have indicated that the victims were armed at the time of the attack, but the position of their bodies indicated that they were not fighting when they died.
