NATO and Serb officials are blaming each other for air attacks in Kosovo yesterday in which at least 64 refugees were killed as they travelled in a convoy through the province.
Serb official media reported that 64 civilians were killed when NATO aircraft bombed the convoy yesterday afternoon in Kosovo. But the Pentagon said last night that NATO was investigating reports that Serb troops or police attacked civilian refugees in the convoy after Yugoslav military vehicles in the military convoy were bombed by NATO warplanes.
The Pentagon spokesman, Mr Ken Bacon, said the NATO commander in Europe, Gen Wesley Clark, had received reports that "after the convoy was hit, military people got out and attacked civilians."
He said the reports were preliminary and were being investigated. Mr Bacon said Serb military vehicles were at either end of the convoy with civilians in between, and that NATO pilots felt sure that they had attacked only the military vehicles.
Mr Bacon said Gen Clark had "received reports from the pilots that they believe they hit only military vehicles . . . he has also received verbal reports that after the convoy was hit, military people got out and attacked civilians."
Specifically, Mr Bacon said, NATO was investigating reports that "after the attacks on the military vehicles, that then either Yugoslav army or special police people went out and began to attack civilians in the middle of the convoy."
In Brussels, NATO said it could not confirm reports civilians were killed in the bombing raid near Djakovica in Kosovo, but stressed the NATO planes attacked only military targets.
Albanian opposition politicians in Tirana said refugees arriving at the Albanian border town of Kukes from Kosovo reported that Serbian helicopters attacked them yesterday near Prizren, killing at least 40 people.
Both the Pentagon and NATO said that the air attacks were carried out on military vehicles near a bridge just east of Djakovica. The aircraft were fired on by antiaircraft artillery and mobile surface-to-air missiles, they said.
Serbian official media said 64 people were killed when the convoy of about 100 vehicles, including tractors and cars, carrying several thousand ethnic Albanian civilians was attacked from the air on the highway.
Eighteen bodies, some of them missing limbs, were still lying at the scene when reporters were escorted there by Serbian officials. An investigative judge, Mr Milenka Momcilovic, said 20 people had been killed and four injured.
The Serb-run Media Centre in Pristina said 44 people had been killed in a separate attack on another convoy of refugees on the road between Djakovica and Prizren to the south.
"When the planes came, they told us to get down, but by then it was too late," said one man, speaking among abandoned tractors and scattered belongings on a road in Western Kosovo.
The latest deaths came as EU leaders backed a UN peace plan, saying NATO's three-week-old bombing campaign would be suspended in Belgrade acted immediately to meet key demands. The British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, attending the EU summit in Brussels, said: "We cannot take at face value any claim made by the Serb authorities."
In Bonn, the German Defence Minister, Mr Rudolf Scharping, said Serb artillery, not NATO planes, had hit the refugee convoy. "Everything points to it being Serbian artillery which opened fire on the refugees and that they then presented it as a NATO mistake," he said.
Air raid sirens sounded in Belgrade again last night and three loud explosions were heard in Pristina.
Meanwhile, the Irish Government said yesterday it was ready to offer temporary sanctuary to 1,000 ethnic Albanian refugees forced to flee from Kosovo.
"If refugees come to Ireland, they will be given refuge and protection until such time as they are able to return to Kosovo in safety and security," the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, said.