When Serbian prison guards came to Gazmend Azemi's cell on Saturday morning, he thought it was his turn to die.
"They said they were taking us to Albania," Azemi (23) recalled. "I said, `They're taking us to the border, and they're going to shoot us. We're going to be massacred'."
But that afternoon - and in a second wave yesterday - Azemi and more than 1,000 other Kosovo Albanian men walked across the border in an unprecedented release of military age men rounded up by Serb-led Yugoslav forces several weeks ago. Many had been feared dead or locked away in camps or held by government security forces for use as "human shields".
The men, some so weak and emaciated they had to be carried by their comrades, wept in each other's arms after walking the last four miles to the Albanian border. All had been held at a prison in the Kosovo town of Smrekovnica, about 20 miles north-west of Pristina, the provincial capital.
Most of the freed men - 583 crossed the border on Saturday, 419 more by late yesterday - were in their late teens or early twenties. They said about 2,000 were still being held at the prison.
International aid officials said they were baffled by the release of the men. "One possible explanation" said one, "is that the Serbs want to undermine NATO propaganda that they are taking men off of convoys and just killing them."
"Some of the (freed men) said they had been given a haircut and a shave, which seems to support the idea that this was a gesture of goodwill."
Belgrade officials have apparently changed their minds again on Kosovo refugees in general, as up to 14,000 flowed into Macedonia on Saturday and yesterday after a week in which Yugoslav authorities were said to be preventing them from leaving.
The released men had similar stories to tell. Many had been taken from their homes during a broad sweep of villages around the city of Kosovska-Mitrovica by Serbian security forces about three weeks ago. The rest said they had been in custody for about a month after being pulled by police from a large refugee convoy.
According to Azemi the convoy stretched about 2 1/2 miles and was made up of thousands of people lugging their belongings toward Albania. He said Serbian police followed the convoy and looted it and that seven older refugees died on the trek.
Azemi, his father and three sisters had shuffled along with the convoy for almost a week when, on April 25th, just outside Djakovica, Serbian police pulled him aside. "I was scared," he said. "I thought they were going to shoot me."
His father knew one of the police. Crying, he begged the officer not to take his son, and the man replied not to worry, he would only be questioned for a few hours and released. "They finally told my father to just keep walking, or they would shoot me in front of him," Azemi said. He and 53 other men were detained for four days in the Kosovska-Mitrovica jail.
"It was very, very bad. There was no air to breathe. They did not feed us the first two days. We had to go to the toilet outside, but you got beaten if you asked to go there. For three days we did not sleep because it was too hot, but you got beaten if you asked to open the window."
During interrogations, he said, police beat his legs with a plastic stick and slapped him in the face. "They asked everybody the same thing: `Do you know anyone in the KLA? Are you in the KLA? Do you support them? Have you given them money?' "
On April 29th, the group was moved to a school in Serbitza, he said. On May 9th men from the school were moved to the prison at Smrekovnica.