War crimes experts are to investigate the site of another possible torture centre discovered in Kosovo. British Paratroopers setting up a base in an old prison found rooms with piles of handcuffs and more than a dozen truncheons, some of them broken.
The prison, just outside the village of Lipljan in central Kosovo, is a series of low three-storey blocks surrounded by fencing with defensive positions dug into the ground. In the guard room are piles of paper with lists of Albanian names on them. Many of the lists are dated from early April, when the NATO bombing started.
Inside the main building is a soundproofed room and another with piles of syringes. In the four blocks there are cells measuring 12 ft by 6 ft - in many there are Albanian names scratched on the wall. In one room a syringe lay on the floor alongside a wad of bloodied paper. In another is a bloodstained mattress with a bowl of what looks like stomach bile alongside it.
In the office block were blue uniforms similar to those worn by the Serb paramilitary police and direct phone lines to their headquarters.
Whoever had left the building had made a hurried attempt to clear it as many rooms had been cleaned out and furniture, paper and clothes had been dumped outside.
Locals have told the troops that up to 50 people were held to a cell and they suspect the prison was used for torture.
However the military said there could also be innocent explanations for the items found there.
The discovery follows other evidence uncovered earlier this week of a large-scale policy of beatings, rape and other tortures perpetrated by the Serb Interior Police, known as the MUP.
Newspapers around the world yesterday carried pictures taken in a five-storey concrete building in south-east Pristina which was student accommodation requisitioned by the MUP after its own headquarters were bombed. Down a flight of stairs - into what one shocked British soldier called "the pit of despair" - were five iron-barred concrete cells, and rooms littered with instruments of torture.
Among the weapons found were a box of vicious-looking metal knuckle-dusters, a giant machete, axes and rubber hoses.
One baseball bat had the chilling order "Shut Your Mouth" carved into its wood in Serbian.
Dried blood was spattered around the cells, and in one bloodstained bandages were found.
According to ethnic Albanians, Kosovars in Pristina were rounded up and taken to this building where they were tortured and murdered - what was abandoned there, and what was discovered in the other building yesterday, is evidence to support those claims.
Reuters adds:
German soldiers yesterday freed about 15 prisoners recently tortured in a police station occupied by the Kosovo Liberation Army but came too late to save one who had died only hours earlier, an army spokesman said.
The KLA's Commander Drini said the prisoners, a mix of Albanians, gypsies and at least one Serb, were criminals. But residents crowding around the feared exMUP special police headquarters said they recognised at least two as informers for the Serbian police, who fled the south-western city of Prizren on Monday.
The dead man, about 70 years old and not immediately identified, was found beaten and handcuffed to a chair in the central Prizren building which the KLA occupied several days ago, German army spokesman Lieut-Col Dietmar Jeserich said at the scene.
Angry Serbs who fled Prizren earlier this week alleged the KLA often tortured Serbs but this appeared to be the first case of mishandled people in KLA captivity to be found in Prizren, Kosovo's second largest city.
"We found many instruments that could be used as torture instruments," said Lieut-Col Jeserich, adding these included a club with a chain, sticks with nails and some kind of skewers. Residents said they believed these belonged to the interior ministry police.
Mr Gani Berisha, a middle-aged gypsy who was among the freed prisoners, said he had been held for two days and nights without food or water after being hauled away from his home by KLA men who, he said, had beaten his wife and children.
Commander Drini, whose real name is Ekrem Rexha, strode out of the police station after witnessing the evacuation and angrily accused Mr Berisha of stealing.