British forensic experts have uncovered a mass grave in Kosovo containing the bodies of 50 people, including women and children, the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, said yesterday.
Mr Cook said the grave was the largest so far uncovered by the forensic team and reiterated Britain's call for Serb officials to be brought to justice for a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovo Albanians.
The bodies were buried four metres beneath a rubbish dump in Ljubidza, 6 km north of the town of Prizren.
"We believe there are 50 bodies in the grave," Mr Cook said after talks with Mr Hashim Thaqi, political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
Before Wednesday's discovery the forensic team had already exhumed 280 bodies found in eight sites around Kosovo. Mr Cook said many of them were children and one was only two years old.
He said all the evidence gathered by the experts would be made available to an international war crimes tribunal which has already indicted the Yugoslav president, Mr Slobodan Milosevic.
British officials said the grave at Ljubidza contained the bodies of a "considerable number" of women and children. Meanwhile, in Belgrade, Serbia's ultra-nationalist deputy premier Mr Vojislav Seselj denied there were mass graves in Kosovo where the ethnic Albanian victims of Serb reprisals were buried.
"There is no proof at all of massive Serb crimes, murders of civilians, women, children, as western propaganda has trumpeted all along," he said. He said US officials persistently claimed there were mass graves in Kosovo, in which the victims of Serb reprisals were buried.
"There are no such graves. Have they found them anywhere? No. Of course, they found buried Albanian terrorists," Mr Seselj, head of the hardline Serbian Radical Party (SRS), said.
What does exist in Kosovo, however, according to Mr Seselj, are "mass graves with the bodies of Serb civilians, obviously massacred by the Albanian terrorists."
"The Americans are hiding this systematically, helped by their servants, correspondents of western media, among them Serbs," he said.