A dead man hung upside down in the pancaked rubble of the Radio Televizija Srbije (RTS) building, his brains oozing out of the top of his head. The body of the station's make-up artist - the close friend of an interpreter for a British television network - was charred beyond recognition. A limp, dead hand emerged from the ruins.
Dust and smoke swirled in the searchlights as yellow-helmeted firemen pulled the wreckage away. There was a strong odour of burning plastic - electrical cables or videotape? - as hundreds of stunned Serbs watched from behind police lines in Tasmajdan Park.
"Why is NATO doing this?" a part-time RTS employee asked me. "Don't they realise that this will really make people hate them?"
At least 10 people were killed when cruise missiles struck the state-run television building in central Belgrade at 2.06 a.m. yesterday, but the death toll is expected to rise. About 100 journalists and technicians were working when the explosion occurred, and yesterday afternoon firemen still struggled to remove the roof of the four collapsed storeys of the network's main control room and tape recording centre. Survivors moaned or tapped from beneath concrete slabs. One man could only be freed by amputating both his legs.
RTS had anticipated the bombardment and within six hours was broadcasting from another location, showing images of monasteries and historical paintings, then reports on its own destruction. The patriotic songs and marching soldiers were back on air - Mr Blair called the station "a recruiting sergeant for Milosevic's wars" - so NATO had killed at least 10 civilians for nothing.
A NATO spokesman first mentioned the station's possible destruction in a briefing two weeks ago. RTS was "the heart of Slobodan Milosevic's propaganda machine", he said. But if the station agreed to broadcast six hours of western television each day, it might be spared. Another NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said that RTS was not on NATO's target list. But the question of the station's fate kept cropping up, and the NATO commander, Gen Wesley Clark, reportedly led those advocating its destruction.
On Monday, April 19th, the CNN office in Belgrade received a telephone call from an executive in Atlanta. The White House had told the US network that RTS would be destroyed despite the risk of civilian casualties, and that CNN should cease operating in the RTS building.
A few hours later, Mr Goran Matic, a Yugoslav minister without portfolio, held a press conference where he invited foreign journalists "to see the building that makes NATO tremble". The television studios on Takovska Street "will be bombed tomorrow", he predicted. He was wrong by three days.
Western correspondents did not take Mr Matic seriously. They did not believe that after more than 100 Serbs and ethnic Albanians were accidentally killed in NATO bombings of Aleksinac, the Grdelica passenger train and the Prizren refugee convoys, NATO would deliberately target a radio and television station.
At Mr Matic's press conference, an Australian journalist asked how Serb officials could possibly believe that NATO would do anything so absurd as attack a building where hundreds of civilians were known to work round the clock. "Absurd?" Mr Matic responded. "The assault on Yugoslavia was absurd. The attack on the train was absurd. The attack on the convoy was absurd . . . "
Yesterday, Serb officials claimed that the attack on RTS was an attempt to muzzle the international press too; after all, they noted, foreign television networks transmitted their videotape from the destroyed building. Earlier, Serb media widely reported British government criticism of the BBC correspondent John Simpson and his reporting on NATO's April 12th bombing of the bridge where a passenger train was hit.
Serb television is biased and pro-Milosevic. It has emphasised NATO strikes against infrastructure and civilians, but rarely reports attacks on Serb military targets. And it has totally ignored the Serbs' "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo Albanians. It refers to western heads of state as plotters, "fascists" and "blood-thirsty criminals".
Propaganda videos show the US Secretary of State, Mrs Madeleine Albright, wearing a Nazi helmet, her face becoming a skull with flames shooting from the eye sockets. In other clips from the NATO u Blato ("NATO into the mud") series, Adolf Hitler transmogrifies into President Clinton and Hitler pats a little boy on the head, calling him Javier Solana.
Uncomfortable as they were at Serb attempts to equate them with RTS journalists, western correspondents in Belgrade - some of whom had been working in the RTS building - were asking yesterday how NATO could claim moral superiority after killing journalists and technicians because it did not like the content of their broadcasts.
The attack was condemned by the International Federation of Journalists, but western leaders tried to justify it. A British cabinet minister, Ms Clare Short, said "the propaganda machine is prolonging the conflict - this is a legitimate target". The NATO spokesman, Mr Shea, compared the attack with strikes of the two previous nights that destroyed Mr Milosevic's party headquarters and home - without casualties.
"There will be no sanctuary for those aspects of the regime which are spreading hatred and creating this political environment for repression," Mr Shea said.
Rajka, a Serb woman living across the street from the RTS building, noticed fire trucks around the television station on Thursday night and could not go to sleep for fear it would be bombed.
Note the fire trucks: the Serbs knew the building was to be destroyed, but like NATO they were willing to sacrifice the journalists inside rather than back down. Rajka talked with a neighbour and watched television until 2 a.m. She had just tip-toed back into her own flat to avoid waking her family when she was jolted by the explosion.
"It's a thing that only happens to you once in your life," she said. "I went to the balcony and I saw a huge cloud of dust where the building was . . . What happens next?"
Other targets that were bombed early yesterday give an indication of what NATO has in mind for Serbia's immediate future. The main post office and telephone exchange in the south-eastern town of Uzice were bombed, putting 80,000 telephones out of order. Two hours after the RTS building was destroyed, NATO aircraft bombed power transmitters at Resnik and Zemun Polje, depriving most of Belgrade's suburbs of electricity.
NATO is celebrating its 50th anniversary "with blood-stained hands", the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Nebojsa Vujovic, said. "This is a campaign of intimidation. It's a campaign to bomb the Serbian people into submission."