Serbian police called in army reinforcements yesterday as fighting broke out against separatist guerrillas at the site of the massacre last Friday of ethnic Albanian villagers in Kosovo.
Local people, international monitors and reporters were forced to flee Racak village as mortar and machine-gun fire erupted from police positions on a nearby hill. Locals said some old men had stayed behind.
The corpses of 45 civilians, most of them shot at close range, were discovered in Racak and neighbouring villages on Saturday. President Clinton blamed Serb security forces for the massacre. NATO ambassadors met in Brussels to discuss a response.
The 16 members of NATO strongly condemned the latest massacre during an emergency meeting in Brussels which did not decide on any military intervention, diplomats said. They added that US Gen Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander for Europe, and German Gen Klaus Naumann, head of the alliance's military committee, would go to Belgrade today to meet President Slobodan Milosevic.
Serb police summoned army reinforcements after ethnic Albanian guerrillas returned fire from woods near Racak. Police, monitors and reporters dived for cover as bullets flew over their heads.
Shortly afterwards a Yugoslav military armoured personnel carrier and a truck full of troops headed towards the village, followed by six more police armoured vehicles. This was followed by cover fire to allow Serb infantry to enter the village.
Meanwhile, NATO began crisis talks on a response to the Racak atrocity which left its strategy for containing the Kosovo conflict in ruins. Last October, NATO authorised its forces to strike Yugoslav military targets if Belgrade violated pledges to seek a peaceful solution. The alliance has kept in place an "activation order" enabling it to revert quickly to the use of force if necessary.
Yesterday, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, leader of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, called for NATO air strikes. Albania, condemning the killings as a "monstrous crime", called for an urgent debate in the UN Security Council and direct intervention.
Earlier, reporters in Racak saw relatives sobbing over the corpses, laid out in a mosque with their heads covered by towels. Among the bodies were a young woman and a boy of 12. Some victims showed signs of mutilation.
A young boy, walking around the mosque with his grandfather, cried: "I don't know what we can do now. We can do nothing."
Further up the hill, Vjolca Jakupi (16) trembled as she described how police had lined up five men in the hall of her house, beaten them and threatened to kill them in front of her and other women and children. They were part of a group who survived.
"We are very afraid," she said. "We hope we will be able to leave before dark as I don't know if we will survive the night." Dozens of ethnic Albanian civilians, mainly women and children, later fled the village on foot, carrying babies and small bags of belongings. They said they had left some old men behind to look after their houses.
The deputy head of the international monitoring team in Kosovo, Maj Gen John Drewienkiewicz of Britain, said a Yugoslav judge seeking to investigate the killings had ignored his appeals not to take police into Racak.
"I consider this to be a very provocative act by the Yugoslav authorities, which have again broken the ceasefire," he said in Stimlje, less than a mile from Racak.
Serb authorities said those killed in Racak were "terrorists" shot in clashes with police. However, President Clinton said: "This was a deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder designed to sow fear among the people of Kosovo."
The French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, said those responsible for "these barbarous acts" would be brought to justice.