Serb police waited until the body of the 11-year-old boy they had shot the day before had been lowered into his grave on a Kosovo hillside before they opened fire from a nearby strong point.
As bullets whipped by overhead, journalists and mourners scattered from the graveside. But not the international monitors.
A team of American observers, supposedly guarantors that Kosovo's latest ceasefire will hold, had already driven away in their bright orange Land Rover, refusing family requests to watch over the funeral.
So there will be no official report of the 200 mourners rushing downhill out of the line of fire yesterday afternoon outside the village of Krajkovo, 16 miles west of the capital, Pristina.
Shemsi Elshani was killed the day before on an adjacent hillside as he carried water up from his house in Krajkovo to his father and cousin chopping wood in the forest above.
"It was after midday when they shot," said his father Rashit (37), his blue eyes looking away into space. "My cousin screamed that he was wounded in the hand. I didn't know they had hit Shemsi too. I managed to go on my hands and knees through the woods. Then I ran to the house. When I came home I realised my son was up there."
A sister-in-law brought the body down, but the agony for the family was not over. The French medical team, MΘdecins Sans FrontiΦres, refused to take Shemsi's cousin, Zymber (18), to hospital because he was a "man of military age" and the Serbs might accuse them of helping a combatant.
The Red Cross said medical evacuation was not their job. So it was left to a film crew from Spanish Television to get him to hospital in time to save his arm.
Under Islamic custom, Shemsi's body should be placed in the ground the day after death, but there was a problem. The freshly dug grave, on a bleak hilltop with no cover, was already being raked by Serb sniper fire.
"They are shooting the whole time," said Rashit, as artillery boomed somewhere in the distance. "There's heavier shooting during the night."
Krajkovo is only one of dozens of villages which are being shot at, day and night, by Serb firebases dug into hilltop positions across Kosovo. The firing, and the fear it creates, is frustrating efforts by aid workers to persuade more than 50,000 ethnic Albanians to come down from freezing hillsides.
"They shoot every day, every night, this is not unusual," said Mr Maliq Elshani, a villager. "Each night we take our families into the woods to sleep. It is very cold now, and this is hard for the little children."
By midday yesterday teams of EU and US monitors had arrived at Krajkovo. These monitors are supposedly there to guarantee that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will honour his promise, made under the threat of NATO air strikes, to stop fighting in Kosovo and pull back his troops. But the monitors left abruptly without explanation from their chief, a grey-bearded American in a blue baseball cap.
Half-an-hour later, after a funeral service pared to the bone in the interests of safety, the firing began and the mourners scattered without casualties - except, perhaps, to the credibility of the world's institutions who insist they can assure peace in Kosovo.
NATO generals wound up urgent talks yesterday to get Serbian troops out of Kosovo, but combat forces continued to roam with impunity, western monitors reported.
Large numbers of government security forces remained in the province - including a previously unspotted Yugoslav federal army armoured battalion rolling into a tense western pocket - and gunfire echoed around the hills. The NATO supreme commander, General Wesley Clark, and the chairman of his military committee, General Klaus Naumann, met President Milosevic and commanding Gen Momcilo Perisic for a 12-hour overnight session lasting until 5 a.m. yesterday.
The talks resumed in the late morning without media access and ended in mid-afternoon. Gen Clark and Gen Naumann had no comment on the result and planned to fly back to Brussels shortly.