Well over 10,000 innocent people may have been killed by Serb security forces during the Kosovo conflict, the British government said yesterday. A Foreign Office minister, Mr Geoff Hoon, said that NATO was revising upwards its estimate of the number of ethnic Albanian casualties.
"Tragically our estimates of the numbers of innocent men, women and children killed will almost certainly have to be revised upwards. According to the reports we had gathered, mostly from the refugees, it appeared that around 10,000 people had been killed in more than 100 massacres.
"The final total may be much worse," he said at yesterday's daily briefing in London on the conflict.
Mr Hoon said some of the atrocities being uncovered defied belief. "It is still hard to credit that our fellow human beings could be guilty of machine-gunning children, systematic rape of young women and girls, digging mass graves and burning bodies to try to conceal the evidence of murder. But this all happened in Kosovo"
As more and more mass graves, and other evidence of Serb slaughter of unarmed civilian Kosovars, emerge every day, it was announced yesterday that the first forensic team from the United Nations war crimes tribunal would enter Kosovo today.
Peacekeeping troops had secured the first Kosovo locations identified by prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, said the tribunal spokesman, Mr Jim Landale. "They will be able to start work immediately. They will begin by mapping and photographing sites."
The entry of UN forensic teams had been hampered by Kfor's slowness in providing logistical support and establishing a permanent headquarters in Pristina. Prosecutors said on Wednesday they were concerned that returning refugees and journalists would reach the sites first.