Bloodied bodies littered a road among abandoned tractors and strewn belongings in western Kosovo yesterday after what Serbian officials said was a NATO air attack on a convoy of refugees.
Wounded survivors, some with ghastly injuries, were loaded onto carts on the road near the village of Meja, a few kilometres from the western town of Djakovica. One was carried in a wheelbarrow.
"When the planes came, they told us to get down but by then it was too late," said one man. A boy, Mharem Alija, said there had been a huge explosion.
Some of the dead had been crushed by a house wrecked by the blast. There was a gaping hole in the ground nearby.
Eighteen bodies, some of them missing limbs, were still lying at the scene in the afternoon when reporters were escorted there by Serbian officials.
An Investigative judge, Mr Milenka Momcilovic, said 20 people had been killed and four injured. Police displayed part of a bomb they said they had found nearby.
The mother of one woman, whose face was covered in blood, said between sobs that she had come from Junik and had been trying to reach the border to leave Kosovo.
The Serb-run Media Centre in the Kosovo regional capital Pristina said 64 people had been killed by NATO, 44 of them in a separate attack on another convoy of refugees on the road between Djakovica and Prizren to the south.
It said three policemen escorting one of the columns, which it said were taking refugees back to their homes, were among at least 20 people wounded.
NATO military sources confirmed NATO warplanes had attacked vehicles on the Prizren-Djakovica road in Kosovo but said it was a military target and that it was too soon to comment on the death toll.
Reuters reports from Belgrade:
A Serbian official from the southern town of Leskovac said the death toll from the NATO missile attack which struck a train on Monday was 14, but could rise as high as 50.
"The total number of killed confirmed so far is 14," Mr Nebojsa Stojcic, an investigative judge was quoted as saying. He added that that 10 bodies have been identified so far, including a five-year-old child.
Mr Stojcic said that the higher casualty figure was based on the numbers of bodies and body parts found on the site, registered missing people, personal belongings and other evidence gathered from the wreckage of the train.
A regional information official said earlier that 17 people were missing and 16 injured.
The train was at a standstill on a railway bridge across South Morava river at Grdelica ravine, 250 km south-east of Belgarde, when it was hit.
NATO confirmed on Monday that an air-launched missile had hit the train, but said the train itself was not the target and expressed regret for the loss of life.
Nine burned bodies were pulled out soon after the hit, and one was later found in nearby river. The 16 injured were taken to Leskovac hospital.
Rescue workers said immediately after the attack they feared many more bodies would be found in the river.
Meanwhile, the UN and Nato have said intense fighting has made it unsafe even for a neutral country to take food to thousands stranded in Kosovo.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms Sadako Ogata, and the NATO Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, said both organisations were urgently seeking ways to help up to 260,000 Kosovo Albanians uprooted from their homes.