Discovery of the remains of at least 20 men apparently burned alive provided macabre evidence yesterday of a mass killing in the southern Kosovo village of Velika Krusa which Serb forces abandoned only the night before.
"For the moment, we know for certain there are at least 20 corpses entirely burned," Capt Michael Bos of the German army said. Fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had led the German military to the scene of the massacre.
Arkan, the indicted war criminal Zeljko Raznatovic, denied that he was responsible for the massacre. "We didn't kill innocent civilians. We did kill the soldiers in a fair fight. It's a big difference," he said in Belgrade, adding that neither he nor his militia - the Tigers - had been in Kosovo.
Witnesses say otherwise. Arkan (45) has been indicted for crimes against humanity arising out of his conduct in Bosina in the early 1990s.
The bodies in Velika Krusa were discovered when Ismet Tara, a KLA man led the German NATO troops to the scene. He said that more than 50 village men were murdered in the house on March 26th, two days after NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began.
"They were burned alive," he reported. The area was cordoned off as investigators of the Kfor peacekeeping force and the international war crimes tribunal examined the evidence.
"On March 26th, tanks, armoured vehicles, and a lot of army and paramilitary arrived in the village," Tara, an eye-witness, recalled. "They opened fire with heavy weapons and destroyed houses. The KLA had to leave, but the civilian population remained at the mercy of the Serbs.
"Men between 16 and 60 were singled out. There were about 250 of them," Tara said. "They were separated into three groups. The first was the one in this house."
The other men were taken away, and the village was razed to the ground, apart from three houses kept as Serb army quarters.
Fifty-year-old Fodil Zeqiri stood weeping at one of these after hearing a description of the way his father died. Witnesses said the 77year-old man had been tied to a tree, shot, then his body had been thrown into a house which was later burned down.
The charred remains were still there, and a metal collar and chain was still hanging from a tree.
The 37-kilometre route between Prizren and Djakovica was lined with burned-down dwellings and
devastated villages, their walls and roofs smashed.
Returning Kosovars and NATO Kfor troops expect to find evidence of more massacres. Another witness approached Kfor units in Velika Krusa reporting the discovery of yet more bodies, this time riddled with bullets in a house at nearby Drini.
Djakovica, the town at the end of the road, has been dubbed "Martyr City". Its population is almost entirely Kosovo Albanians and it has been devastated.
One inhabitant, Skander Nikolici, reported: "Nearly 1,000 young men, our finest, were rounded up by the Serbs. They were dumped in a chicken factory, but we don't know what happened to them after that."