Kosovans prepare to rebury massacre victims, including 7 young children

Mourning villagers dug fresh graves yesterday to rebury seven young children and 58 adults allegedly killed by Serbs in the village…

Mourning villagers dug fresh graves yesterday to rebury seven young children and 58 adults allegedly killed by Serbs in the village of Bela Crkva in March.

As they dug, some recalled their own survival, the horror of the execution of the children along with two men and three women, and what they termed the Serbs' indiscriminate shooting into a crowd of men herded to a nearby stream.

The remains of five adults and the children - three boys aged four, six and seven, and four girls aged six, nine, 10 and 12 - were unearthed by British war crimes investigators.

The villagers said yesterday that 10 of them would go to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague to identify some of the killers.

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"We heard the shootings. Clirim's family was executed," Mr Isuf Zhuniqi (39) said of his lifelong friend and neighbour.

British experts said the children and five adults had all been shot in the back of the head. One of the children, a two-year-old, survived because his mother fell on him and he now lives with relatives in Germany, Mr Zhuniqi said.

The other family executed included four children, who were sheltering in Clirim's home because their own village had already become a Serb target.

Clirim's house, like the rest of the village, was destroyed when Serb forces set it ablaze after killing the families - and mowing down a crowd of men by a stream nearby. Mr Isuf Zhuniqi, who was among these men, played dead to survive. He still has a bullet in his shoulder, one of seven wounds from that shooting and a Serb attack in the village of Nagavc where he sought refuge.

He hid in a canal until the Serbs forced him and the other men to give themselves up, undress, and hand over their money. They then sprayed them with bullets by a stream, he said.

"All the dead bodies fell on top of seven or eight people who fell in the stream and survived. I was the first to stand up and I saw many of them were dead. Many were wounded in the head, legs and arms," he said.

Yesterday, as the grim work of digging the graves went on, villagers said the charred bodies of old people who had stayed at home when Serb tanks came had also been found. There would be a total of 65 graves in this field donated by a local farmer.

A NATO delegation flew to Moscow yesterday in an apparent eleventh hour bid to head off yet another Kosovo peacekeeping row between Russia and the West, after the alliance refused to let Moscow send more troops.

The United States and NATO pressed Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary to deny Russia their air space, forcing Moscow to ground Kosovo-bound troops due to start flying yesterday.

Meanwhile, a US embassy official in Moscow said a US diplomat, assistant army attache, LtCol Peter Hoffman, was expelled from Moscow on Thursday.

In Washington, a White House spokesman declined to comment on the expulsion but discouraged speculation it might be linked to Russian unhappiness over Kosovo peacekeeping arrangements.