NATO warplanes bombed targets in the suburbs of Belgrade early today as residents formed a human shield to protect one of the main bridges in the city from air raids, local media and eyewitnesses said.
They hit a fuel depot at Smederevo, 50 km south-east of Belgrade starting a fire, Tanjug news agency reported.
"NATO aircraft hit the wider area of eastern Belgrade," the local Studio B television station quoted the city's civil defence crisis centre as saying. "I've heard two distant explosions coming from the old part of the city," a resident said.
Tanjug also said that at least seven missiles hit Kragujevac, 120 km south of Belgrade. No details were available. The agency said that anti-aircraft defences had opened fire on NATO warplanes over Novi Sad, capital of Voivodina province 70 km north of Belgrade.
Meanwhile up to 55,000 of the refugees evacuated from the Kosovo/Macedonia border area have been accounted for, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said yesterday. But the agency expressed fears for thousands more who vanished from the Kosovo side of the border, not far from the muddy field at Blace in Macedonia where other refugees had gathered.
"We believe... that at Blace - taking the field, the people at the border, the people backed up - there were perhaps between 60,000 and 70,000 people three days ago. We can account for between 50,000 and 55,000," said Mr Nicholas Morris, the UNHCR envoy to the former Yugoslavia.
Meanwhile in Tirana, the Albanian capital, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms Sadako Ogata, said more than 33,000 people had been sent to a NATO-run reception centre in Macedonia, and others to Albania, Turkey, Norway and Germany. "My real concern is with the people who are still in Kosovo - I am sure their conditions are dire," said Ms Ogata. "The serious political problems Macedonia faces I understand, but this was not good enough, to keep that border closed."
In London, a British government minister, Ms Clare Short, said that Serb forces seemed to be rounding up trapped ethnic Albanian refugees and returning them by force after closing border exits from Kosovo. And NATO's chief official suggested that President Milosevic could be planning to use them as human shields against increasingly successful alliance strikes on Serb forces.
Ms Short, who is International Aid Minister, said: "They seem now to have started rounding up refugees queuing to leave Kosovo and returning them by force. We do not know whether they have been driven back to their homes or elsewhere within Kosovo. "They have also closed the frontier crossing points on the Kosovo side. It is not known where the refugees taken back to Kosovo are and what is happening to them."
The NATO Secretary General, Mr Javier Solana, said Mr Milosevic could have two reasons for shutting the border crossings. One could be to avoid pictures of a mass exodus being broadcast around the world.
"Or he could be trying to use people as human shields in case the alliance's military action is concentrated more on the ground," he told Spanish radio.
Similar concerns were expressed in Brussels by the NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, who said alliance members were worried about the fate of fleeing ethnic Albanians trapped within Kosovo since Serb forces closed the border on Wednesday.
"We don't know what has happened to these people, who seem to have been forced back inside Kosovo," he said, noting an estimate by the UN refugee agency in late March of 260,000 people displaced within the southern Serbian province.
Meanwhile, the Macedonian government sought yesterday to reject criticism of its handling of refugees and blamed NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia for setting in train the mass exodus.