The long-awaited forensic report into the massacre of 45 Kosovo Albanians, which triggered the present Paris peace talks and NATO's bombing threat, was released yesterday. The massacre was described as a "crime against humanity" by Dr Helen Ranta, head of a team of Finnish pathologists sent by the European Union to investigate the killings in the village of Racak on January 18th.
But Dr Ranta stopped short of apportioning blame for the crime, saying that was beyond her mandate.
"This is a crime against humanity, yes," she said. "The question of who did it is not answered here."
The head of the international monitors in Kosovo, US diplomat Mr William Walker, has already blamed Serb forces for the killing of 45 people, most of whom were found shot dead on a hillside near the village. He said yesterday he saw no reason to change his verdict.
While ethnic Albanians said Dr Ranta's report did not go far enough, Kosovo Serbs said it was wrong: "We knew from the very first moment in January that this wasn't a massacre," said Mr Radovan Urosevic, director of Kosovo's Serbian Media Centre. "This is an international fog over the truth."
In fact, Dr Ranta's team has gone farther than many European pathologists would have done; traditionally their job in an inquest is limited to the facts of the death, rather than apportioning blame.
Her report, which she said had 3,000 photographs and weighs 41 kilograms, refuted Serb claims that the dead, all but one of whom were male, were rebel soldiers of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Her findings were that they were unarmed civilians.
She said 22 of them appeared to have been shot together in the gully in which they were found.
Last month, US sources quoted in the Washington Post said they had radio intercepts on tape which proved the Racak operation was ordered by senior Serb officials. Mr Walker's blaming of the Serbs led to his being threatened with expulsion from the province by Belgrade.
The timing of the report is good for the hawks in NATO, led by the US and Britain, which want to threaten air strikes if the Serbs either intensify their attacks on ethnic Albanians or refuse to allow NATO peacekeepers into the province as part of a peace deal.
Defying those threats, Serb forces continue their methodical offensive to drive KLA units from the slopes of Cicavica mountain, 12 miles north of Pristina, the capital. A chain of Albanian villages set on fire by Serb attacks the day before continued to blaze.
The KLA said Serb forces had forced the local headquarters, one of seven in Kosovo, to retreat from its base in the village of Becuk as fighting worsened. The lightly-armed KLA guerrillas have little choice but to fall back before the measured Serb offensive. Monitors say the Serb plan appears to be to take control of the entire Cicavica heights, which would give their artillery a commanding view over the central region of Drenica, which for a year has been the strongest of the guerrilla bastions.
In the face of mounting pressure from the West, Serb mediators at the Paris peace talks remained defiant. Not only do they refuse demands for peacekeeping troops to enforce a proposed peace plan, but they are also contesting 20 points of the peace plan itself.
The Austrian mediator, Mr Wolfgang Petritsch, said that with the ethnic Albanians already agreeing to the plan, and the Serbs refusing key sections, the talking in this third day of the conference had all but finished.