The chief UN official in Kosovo, Mr Bernard Kouchner, yesterday inspected a mass grave site where a UN war crimes forensic team has uncovered the bodies of 72 ethnic Albanians killed at close range.
The forensic experts, led by French pathologist Mr Dominique Lecomte, were seen working on the site, just north of a graveyard in the town, which lies just outside the northern Kosovo city of Kosovska Mitrovica.
A spokesman for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Mr Paul Risley, said autopsies showed that most of the victims had "gunshot wounds close to the head or to the body" while some had apparently been killed with a bayonet or knife. "There is also evidence of torture in the form of broken ribcages and broken wrists," he said. The site was found about a month ago and exhumation and autopsy had been going on for 10 days.
The victims were aged between 20 and 80, he said, and it looked as if the bodies had been buried between April and June this year.
Mr Kouchner said after inspecting the grisly find: "People believe all over the world that the `war of Kosovo' is finished. This is not true. This is not true because of the families' memories, because of the suffering."
Mr Kouchner also apologised for saying on Monday that 11,000 bodies had been found in mass graves in Kosovo. No estimate was yet available, he admitted.
Mr Risley said it was too early for a figure to be given, but he said the number of around 7,000 announced by some international organisations and western governments was "fairly reliable".
Meanwhile, more than 160,000 Serbs are believed to have left Kosovo out of fear for their safety, leaving only about 40,000, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch monitoring organisation.
In an 18-page report, the organisation says Serbs and gypsies are being harassed, beaten and murdered in what looks like a systematic effort to force them out of Kosovo. NATO, it says, seems ill-equipped to stop the harassment.
A spokesman for the Kosovo Liberation Army, Mr Lirak Celaj, denied that the rebel command had any role in the atrocities.
"We fought so that our people could live free," he said. "We didn't fight to bring sadness to other people like we had."
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, yesterday called for action on the estimated 5,000 ethnic Albanians arrested and still missing in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Many families still did not know where their relations were, she said.