Serbs were accused yesterday of seeking to empty Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian population as the UN High Commission for Refugees claimed they were resuming "ethnic cleansing" in the province with brutal force.
"The effort by the Serbian authorities to expel the entire ethnic population of Kosovo is again under way," Mr Kris Janowski, a spokesman with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said.
The agency said a total of 16,000 Kosovo Albanians crossed the Macedonian border in the past three days. Albanian officials warned that another 100,000 could be on the way. In Macedonia, a total of 6,000 refugees arrived yesterday, joining 10,000 who fled there on Wednesday and Thursday.
The spectre of massacres inside Kosovo was reinforced when the US State Department spokesman, Mr James Rubin, said the Washington had new evidence of mass graves.
"We have developed new evidence independently, corroborated by refugee interviews, about mass killings in west-central Kosovo, west of Pristina," Mr Rubin said.
He added: "We have no doubt that military and paramilitary forces under the control of Belgrade are continuing to commit atrocities in Kosovo." Mr Rubin said the US was working with the International War Crimes Tribunal prosecutor on the new information.
He added that US intelligence sources were reporting a total of 400 villages and towns in Kosovo destroyed by Yugoslav forces, 45 in the last week to 10 days.
The UN Human Rights Commissioner, Ms Mary Robinson, also recounted tales of atrocities from refugees, gathered by her investigators. "In the last few days there have been alarming reports of summary executions in four identified locations," she told the Commission. "Cases of arbitrary killings continue to be reported."
At a press conference yesterday in Skopje, a UNHCR spokesman, Mr Ron Redmond, said there were now 118,400 refugees in Macedonia and more than 12,142 had been evacuated to other countries already.
Of the refugees in Macedonia, 78,000 are staying with families and 40,000 are in camps.
In recent days, the UNHCR has speculated that up to 50,000 displaced Kosovans may be heading for the Macedonian border.
"The effort by the Serb authorities to expel the entire ethnic population of Kosovo is again under way," Mr Janowski said.
"A couple of months ago it would have seemed unbelievable to the civilised world that the Serbs would actually expel the entire civilian population, but this seems to be reality now."
The UNHCR estimates that 700,000 people have fled Kosovo since fighting began there in March last year, the overwhelming majority of them in the past few weeks, Mr Janowski said. He said UNHCR could only guess at how many ethnic Albanians remained inside Kosovo but estimated at least 400,000.
The agency was prepared for "between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands" of new refugees in the coming weeks, he said.
The new influx could prompt UNHCR to organise air evacuations from Macedonia, which is concerned that its delicate balance may be upset by the large refugee influx, to countries much further away from the Balkans.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said the physical state of some of the new refugees in Albania raised concerns that food may be scarce for many ethnic Albanians still in Kosovo.
Mr Janowski quoted the account of one woman who had arrived in northern Albania saying she had seen the centre of her home town of Mitrovica burning and 50 bodies lying in the streets.
Further evidence of massacres emerged last night as a BBC TV correspondent claimed to have been handed a videotape which showed six men shot dead in their home in Kosovo.
The video, which was given to the BBC's Matt Frei in a refugee camp in Tirana, was shown on last night's Nine O'Clock News. It was taken by a wedding photographer in the town of Djakova, western Kosovo, on March 27th, and shows six men from one family, including the grandfather, father and son, shot dead in their home.
The Labour Party has called for the immediate suspension of NATO bombing for a specified period, and a simultaneous end to all hostile actions by Serbian forces and KLA.
A statement issued by the party's president and foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Proinsias De Rossa, calls on President Milosevic to accept a "UN-mandated peace enforcement presence" which would include troops from NATO countries, Russia and neutral states.