NATO military commanders and politicians launched a concerted damage limitation exercise yesterday after admitting responsibility - following initial denials - for the single worst incident of civilian casualties caused by Allied bombs in the 23-day-old war in Yugoslavia.
"It was a mistake," NATO's spokesman in Brussels, Mr Jamie Shea, told the organisation's main daily media briefing. "NATO deeply regrets the loss of civilian life in this tragic accident. The pilot released [his bomb] from 5,000 metres and believed it was a military target. It is now clear the lead [front] vehicle was civilian."
The Pentagon, while acknowledging the civilian casualties, cast doubt on where and how they had occurred, and many details remained unclear last night. Military and political leaders insisted that the incident would cause no halt in the bombing campaign.
President Clinton said it was inevitable that civilian casualties, which he described as regrettable, would occur in the war.
"You cannot have this kind of conflict without errors such as this occuring. This is not the business of perfection," he said last night in San Francisco. President Milosevic bore ultimate responsibility, he added.
The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, rejected Yugoslav accusations that the killings constituted a war crime. "We are not going to take any lessons from [President] Milosevic about care for refugees when these refugees are actually in a convoy because they are fleeing from the butchery, the savagery, the rape, the torture, the mutilation of ordinary innocent people," he said.
Earlier, Mr Blair had said no claim by the Yugoslav authorities should be taken at face value.
However, this line was finally abandoned at midday with NATO's admission of responsibility. Last night, the Yugoslav authorities said the toll stood at 75 dead and 25 injured.
"It is good that NATO admitted the attack but it was not an accident," said the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Nebojsa Vujevic.
Prior to NATO's admission, Serbian President Milan Milutinovic said: "This cannot be explained as an error when the columns of refugees were bombed four times. . . This was done deliberately: a massacre of Albanian refugees returning to their homes in the middle of the day."
At the scene of the attack yesterday, there was plenty of evidence of the carnage caused by the bombs. A charred body leaned over the wheel of a burnt-out tractor: a head and torso lay under the vehicle. The burned leg of a carbonised skeleton was stuck to the edge of the tractor-pulled wagon it had tried to jump on - the other leg lay on the ground below it.
As journalists surveyed the carnage, bombs exploded just a few miles away across the plain of Metohije. Pieces of human flesh were scattered for hundreds of metres around the bomb crater. A man's head lay in the field. Perhaps it belonged to the middle-aged body seen in the morgue in Prizren.
A little further on, towards the squat building of a factory, someone had laid the bodies of six Albanians on blankets, one a man with the top half of his head blown away, and three women.
The US pilot of the F-16 jet that caused the deaths said he thought he was bombing military vehicles. In a recording of his debriefing interview after the attack, he described observing what appeared to be "ethnic cleansing" in a valley near Djakovica in south-west Kosovo. After seeing a number of burning villages, he says he saw a column with "three uniformly shaped, darkgreen vehicles that looked like troop-carrying vehicles".
He made several passes over the vehicles "to make sure they were in fact military vehicles", and opened fire with a laser-guided bomb. In fact, his bombs hit carts and tractors carrying refugees.
NATO also acknowledged yesterday that a second convoy was attacked. The Yugoslav authorities said this too was a refugee convoy but NATO, while declining to give details, insisted the target was military.
Refugees entering Albania spoke of an attack on a refugee convoy involving, according to them, Yugoslav military.
In last night's air raids, a bridge over the Danube about 50 km south-east of Belgrade was knocked out, Tanjug news agency reported.