Lying under a grubby blanket, bandages on arm and leg wounds, a young villager yesterday described an alleged massacre by Serb troops on Saturday, of which he was the only survivor. Fourteen of his civilian neighbours were killed.
Serb security forces were also accused of killing 16 ethnic Albanians at Gornje Obrinje in a separate incident in the Drenica region on the same day. Serb officials denied responsibility.
The ethnic Albanian villager said he was the only person to survive the a massacre with clubs, farm tools and a machine-gun. He and other witnesses to the killings asked that neither their names nor the name of their hilltop village in central Kosovo be published, fearing reprisals.
An elderly man said the Serb troops ordered him to bring them coffee and brandy. "I said we had no brandy because we are Muslims," he said. When he brought coffee the troops ordered him to drink some before them, apparently fearing it could be poisoned.
Describing the attack on his village, the young survivor said almost the entire population of the farming community had fled to forests nearby when heavily-armed Serbs, who he described as wearing both police and army uniforms, arrived.
"They found us easily and ordered us all to come out. Then they separated the men from the rest," he said. He said 15 men, ranging from teenagers to men in their forties, were led to the walled garden of a village house.
"We were told to squat with our hands behind our necks. Then I was beaten with sticks.
"Then they started shooting. I was shot in the leg and just pretended to be dead, not moving, until the Serbs left."
Western diplomatic officials were visiting the area and interviewing witnesses yesterday.
Reacting to reports of the first incident, the Yugoslav state news agency, Tanjug, said there was no evidence that Serbs were involved and accused Western media of trying to justify NATO military intervention in the conflict.
Washington condemned the recent attacks on civilians in Kosovo and warned Serb authorities that they could trigger military strikes.
"It just underscores the ugliness and the brutality of the Serb presence in Kosovo and underscores the rational for the efforts that we have been making both diplomatically and through NATO," said the White House spokesman, Mr Michael McCurry.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms Sadako Ogata, fresh from a trip to Kosovo, said her agency had no first-hand knowledge of the killings in Gornje Obrinje, but accused Serbian police of a deliberate campaign of terror to uproot the majority ethnic Albanian population and kill off support for the KLA.
The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, expressed outrage over witness reports of the atrocities, especially as he had been assured by Yugoslavia that no such actions were taking place.