A mass funeral for the 14 Serb farmers killed in Kosovo was postponed yesterday as it was claimed that paramilitary "hit squads" operating under orders from President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia could have been responsible for the killings.
According to reports in London, Kfor troops in Kosovo are investigating claims that it was Serb paramilitaries who carried out the massacre in Gracko, 10 miles from the provincial capital, Pristina.
It has been suggested that the killings did not resemble the pattern of ethnic Albanian revenge attacks and that the Milosevic regime would benefit from destabilising the Kfor mission by showing that Serbs could not be properly protected.
Speaking from Pristina, a Kfor spokesman said they were not aware of the reports but added: "We are investigating every possibility."
Earlier the Kfor commander, Lieut Gen Sir Mike Jackson, said that an attempt to destabilise his mission might have been behind the killings.
He said: "It is one possible explanation. There are a number of explanations, all of which I hasten to add at this stage are entirely speculative.
"It could be a local revenge killing. That is one possible explanation. Another is, I accept entirely, a deliberate attempt to destabilise."
In Gracko, British troops erected three checkpoints along the route to the village where the murders occurred and a platoon guarded the village itself.
Serbs in Gracko had been hoping to bury the farmers but some of the bodies were not ready to be released from the morgue in Pristina, where they are undergoing autopsies as part of an official investigation.
A memorial service due to be attended by UN officials yesterday did not take place.
The killings have increased fear among Kosovo's dwindling Serb population, despite pledges by NATO and the UN to find the attackers and punish them.
The UN administrator in Kosovo, Mr Bernard Kouchner, said he would not to let the killings hamper efforts to create peace and security for all of the province's ethnic groups.
"The murderers sought to stop us. We must not permit that," he said. "Our mission must go on."
Gen Jackson also rejected claims that the killings showed his troops were failing in their role to protect all sides.
Speaking on BBC Radio, he said: "We ought to remember what Kosovo was like before the 12th of June before perhaps jumping to black-and-white conclusions as to whether Kfor is doing its job."
He said the fact that 750,000 refugees had returned in a matter of weeks was a measure of what had been achieved in trying to establish peace and security in the province.
Yugoslavia has demanded an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council, saying that Albanian terrorists are on the rampage in the province.
The message also said that the Yugoslav army should be urgently reinstated along the Yugoslav borders with Albania, Macedonia and inside Kosovo. It demanded a meeting "so that measures can be established for full protection of Serbs, Montenegrins, Roma [gypsies] and other non-Albanian population in Kosovo that have been targeted in the rampage of Albanian terrorists."