"I recognise him by his hips," Zyber Pnishi's son said yesterday as he opened the lid of a well in Kosovo to reveal a rotting torso he is convinced is his father. "He was quite big around the hips," added Ragip (24).
All that could be seen of 60-year-old Zyber was a torso chest down in a deep well in the garden of his brother's house in the village of Pnish.
Two of Zyber's sons, Ragip and 37-year-old Hamdi, returned to Pnish from Albania on Saturday, joining the returning refugees from the neighbouring country which was home to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians fleeing Kosovo.
The two men's father and his 65-year-old brother Ymer were the only two villagers who stayed behind when everyone else fled on April 1st, leaving behind Serb forces who had a base beside Pnish.
A neighbour who ventured back into the village while the Serbs were still there told the two brothers their father and uncle were in the well.
"At first we all fled to the woods. But they returned because they thought no one would touch them because they were too old," Hamdi said.
"We want the Germans [peacekeeping forces] to get them out. We don't dare to do it ourselves. There could be booby traps or mines," he added. A long hunting knife lay in the grass about a metre from the metal cover of the well just outside the house, whose windows had been shattered and whose floors were covered in animal excrement.
Serb forces who villagers say stayed for two months in Pnish had scrawled nationalist graffiti on the car beside the house.
Zyber's younger son opened the metal lid of the well, looking and pointing into it as he explained that he wanted German troops from NATO's force in Kosovo to get them out.
"Yes, I do recognise him," Ragip said, convincing himself, or preparing himself for the inevitable.
"I cannot look. Are there bodies down there?" his older brother said, standing in pain some distance away, shifting from foot to foot as he wrinkled his nose against the stench of death which hangs over the shattered province. Children's pastel-coloured ankle boots and adult shoes were still lined up on wooden shelves on the porch of Ymer's house. The two sons called their uncle's son in Switzerland from a reporter's satellite phone to tell them the bad news.
"Father and uncle are in a well. They have been killed," they said.
Only when they heard the cries of their relatives did the two men finally start to weep.