Black-hooded attackers wearing Yugoslav army and police uniforms massacred at least 45 ethnic Albanian villagers, including a child, in the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo, villagers told peace monitors at the weekend. It was perhaps the worst rampage of killing in the year-old ethnic conflict.
The US Ambassador, Mr William Walker, who heads the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe multinational team trying to monitor Kosovo's collapsing ceasefire, accused Serbian security forces of mass murder after he was shown more than 20 of the dead lying on a hillside.
As Mr Walker picked his way among the scattered corpses, villagers seething with rage or shocked into silence searched the bloodied faces to identify their missing relatives and friends. One man found his brother's decapitated corpse and then went in search of the head.
Most of the dead were old men shot in the head at point-blank range.
Racak is a tiny village just southwest of the town of Stimlje, which is about 16 miles south of Kosovo's capital, Pristina.
Most of the homes and shops in the area are scarred with shell and bullet holes from last year's battles between ethnic Albanian rebels and Serb government forces. Only the bravest villagers had returned, believing that the threat of NATO air strikes made it safe.
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic agreed to let the OSCE monitors in only after NATO threatened air strikes if he did not pull most of his security forces out of Kosovo.
Speaking to reporters after touring the scene, Mr Walker said he had no doubt that Serbian government forces had committed what he called a crime against humanity. He called on the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague to send investigators to Kosovo, even if Belgrade refuses to give them visas.
"Although I am not a lawyer, from what I personally saw, I do not hesitate to describe the event as a massacre, obviously a crime very much against humanity," he told reporters. "Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility."
The Yugoslav government has blocked previous attempts to secure visas that would allow UN investigators into Kosovo.
"The time of stalling over visas and jurisdiction is past. This is a time for legal action," a UN spokesman, Mr Christian Chartier, said.
An elderly survivor, Ms Sandije Ramadani, wept as she told a reporter how she took cover in the locked basement of a farmhouse with 25 women and children after shells started falling at about 7 a.m. on Friday.
Three police officers in camouflage blue uniforms came into the basement demanding to know where guns were stashed, Ms Ramadani said. One of the men wore a black mask and gloves and spoke fluent Albanian, but the others were Serbs, she said.
"I told the police, `If you find any weapons here, you are free to do whatever you want with us. You can execute all of us,' " she said.
The police found no guns, she added. Then they left and locked the door behind them.
About 26 men were sheltering in a cattle pen nearby. One of them was Ms Ramadani's brother, Sadik. She later found him dead.
"They told the men to put their hands above their heads, and then we just heard the men screaming," she said. "It sounded like animals."
Ms Ramadani used a knife to cut through cloth covering the only window and climbed out into the yard. She could hear gunshots in the distance.
By witnessing the horrific aftermath of Friday's massacre, Mr Walker's team has damning evidence of atrocities that ethnic Albanians say they have been suffering for years.
NATO Secretary-General Mr Javier Solana said he was outraged by the killings and warned that NATO "will not tolerate a return to all-out fighting and a policy of repression in Kosovo".
On Saturday Mr Walker ordered several of his unarmed monitors to spend the night in the villages to protect the crime scene and guard against more attacks.
After making their discovery, peace monitors fanned out to look for more dead in the small villages overlooking Racak and reached a count of 45, including three women and a child. They continued their investigations yesterday, but by evening there was no announcement of further bodies.
Until full-scale war broke out in Kosovo last spring, the Kosovo Liberation Army was a small group of fighters overshadowed by a peaceful campaign for independence led by a popular pacifist, Mr Ibrahim Rugova.
However, last year's Serbian offensive that was intended to crush the guerrillas has only made them stronger, with many fresh recruits among the young men who once worked on the farms and in shops that the security forces have destroyed.
A US envoy, Mr Christopher Hill, is trying to negotiate a lasting peace agreement, but neither the Serbian government nor the guerrillas are in the mood to compromise. Friday's massacre makes a return to all-out war more likely.