At least 100 ethnic Albanians were killed and scores injured when NATO jets reportedly dropped cluster bombs on the village of Korisa in south-west Kosovo, survivors and Serbian civil defence officials said yesterday.
NATO said it was investigating the report which, if confirmed, would mark the deadliest error so far by the western alliance in its 52-day-old campaign of air strikes on Yugoslavia.
Officials in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, said 100 people died and 50 were injured in the attack, but they said the toll was expected to rise. Reporters reaching the village of Korisa, 70 km south-west of Pristina, saw scenes of devastation, with dismembered bodies scattered around, several badly charred and some with smoke rising from them.
The reports from Korisa come as NATO is still weathering the storm from the mistaken bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade. It follows other blunders, including the bombing of a hospital in the Serb city of Nis and strikes against a convoy of refugees near the Kosovo town of Djakovo.
One survivor of Thursday night's attack, Mr Fehmi Ahmeta, said the village was packed with some 500 refugees on their way home after hiding in the woods when it was hit by six missiles shortly before midnight. It was not clear whether the refugees feared NATO bombs or Yugoslav forces, who were reported by others reaching nearby Albania to have driven people from their homes in recent days.
NATO said yesterday it had conducted its heaviest night of raids on Yugoslavia since launching its air war on March 24th, but could not confirm the bombing of Korisa. The alliance said it was carrying out a "full and thorough investigation".
"I am not going to speak on this incident until I have the facts," the NATO spokesman, Dr Jamie Shea, said in Brussels.
NATO concentrated some of its most forceful and frequent attacks on Serbian field forces during Wednesday, Thursday and yesterday in the area around Prizren, close to the village of Korisa. The Serbian authorities said the refugees were subjected to a three-hour attack, with many missiles coming from the sky and evidence that cluster bombs were used.
Journalists were taken to the scene yesterday to see the appalling carnage that some said was the worst they had ever seen.
"The visit of journalists to Kosovo was arranged in advance with a bus scheduled to go into Kosovo yesterday," a NATO spokesman, Gen Walter Jertz, told The Irish Times. "The announcement of the allegations came later. We experienced the same kind of thing in Bosnia, discovering later that bodies were carried to be shown in certain places."
Korisa lies in an area which was among the first to be "ethnically cleansed" by Serbian forces in late March. Mihane, a former English teacher from the neighbouring village of Musutiste, said her village had been cleansed and then burned by Serbian paramilitary forces within days of NATO beginning its bombardment.
But Korisa may have served as a staging post for the thousands of civilians who continue to be deported from Kosovo into neighbouring Albania. The village lies along one of three highways on which the bulk of Kosovo's deportees have been passing. Some may well have been resting in the village when the bombers struck last on Thursday night.
Other villages in the Prizren area, including Zrze and Zur, have also become ad-hoc holding areas where hundreds of mostly male ethnic Albanians are kept to be used for forced labour.
Reports on Thursday, which have not been confirmed by NATO, alleged tractor loads of the refugees were put on a bridge over the Drinca river and groups of them under the bridge at Orlate, which was one of NATO's targets on Thursday night.
President Jiang Zemin of China received a telephone call from President Clinton yesterday in which the US leader expressed his "sincere condolences" over the Belgrade embassy bombing.