Last April, Serb soldiers and interior ministry special police marched 55 Kosova Albanian men and boys out of the village of Bela Crkva, in western Kosovo. They ordered them to stand waist-deep in the Beli Drim river that runs below the village.
They then machine-gunned them, killing 48 and wounding seven. The dead ranged in age from 13 to 68 years old.
Eight weeks after they were shot, you could walk out of the village, down through the fields of unharvested onions, tomatoes and corn to the river, and see the hastily-turned earth of the mass grave where terrified friends and neighbours had buried the sodden, torn corpses the night after they died.
As I was standing in the cornfield by the mass grave just one year ago, four days after NATO troops entered Kosovo, there was the urgent clatter overhead of a British RAF Puma helicopter, which whirled in to land almost on top of a group of journalists.
"We saw you lot standing there," said a British International Criminal Tribunal investigator who jumped down from the helicopter, "and thought that there might be a grave site here. "We've just been flying around southern Kosovo, you see, looking for massacre sites from the air."
Twelve months later, the information gathered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from the site has been used to indict President Milosevic for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
With the onset of spring weather, ICTY exhumations have been underway in Kosovo for over a month, and the forensic teams have set themselves the target of exhuming bodies from over 300 sites before winter freezes the ground solid from November onwards.
In the scorching June sunshine, the midday temperature at Dragodan cemetery, on the northern edge of Kosovo's capital, Pristina, is approaching 30 degrees. There's not a breath of wind.
Det Supt Steve Watts, a major crimes investigator with 23 years service in the Hampshire constabulary, looks over at the small hole dug amongst the graves where three British forensic experts are at work.
In technical digging parlance, these scientists, anthropologists and mortuary experts are known as "subterranean technicians".
"It's a good place to hide bodies, in a graveyard," says Det Supt Watts, pouring boiling water from an urn onto the tea-bag in his styrofoam cup. "We had information from Albanian relatives of the dead, saying that people had been seen digging in the graveyard, that bodies had been seen being transported there by tractor."
"The first sites that we are examining this year are ones that are connected to possible indictments," says Det Sgt Philip Caine back at the tribunal offices in Pristina.
Chief Tribunal Prosecutor Carla del Ponte said last year that the tribunal had recovered 2,108 bodies last year in Kosovo, and the final number of Kosova Albanians killed last spring before NATO entered Kosovo should be known before the end of this year.
The ICTY has so far publicly indicted not only President Milosevic, but also four of his senior officials. These are former army chief of staff Ojdanic Dragoljub, Interior Minister Vlajko Siejiljkovic, Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic and Serb President Milan Milatinovic.
NATO Secretary-General Lord George Roberston said this month in Pristina that when indictments are completed, NATO troops will arrest wanted war criminals inside Kosovo.
He declined to comment on whether these would be Serbs suspected of crimes carried out last spring, or Albanians implicated in the wave of revenge killings that have forced 240,000 non-Albanians to flee the tiny province in the last 12 months.
In the last fortnight, eight Serbs have been killed and more than 25 injured in a wave of ethnic violence which has drawn condemnation from both Albanian and Serb political leaders, as well as from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and senior western officials in Kosovo.
In an end-of-year report on Kosovo, Annan stated that of some 330 serious ethnic crimes, such as murder, rape and kidnapping, committed inside Kosovo since January this year, more than 65 per cent targeted Serbs.
Back in the sun of Daragodan cemetery, the subterranean technicans are taking a break from the digging. Hands carefully lathered with anti-bacterial soap, they sit in the shade of a small tent, sipping tea and eating plain McVities digestives.
Det Supt Watts walks over to the hole they've just finished investigating. There's a collection of gardening implements and digging tools lying in a black body-bag by the lip of the pit, and, inside it, a small depression in the brown earth where a body has been removed.
The first part of the exhumation process involves a mechanical digger operated by a Swedish NATO soldier which delicately strips away the soil, inch by inch, looking for the tell-tale signs of discolouration in the earth which indicates the presence of a body. The remains, when found, commonly display signs of gunshot wounds. "It's not a race," says Watts patiently. "It's more important that the evidence that we find is robust and can be tested as evidence."
He straightens up and looks towards the horizon. Across the green fields lies the granite pillar marking the historically crucial Battle of Kosovo Polje, fought in 1389 between Ottoman Turks and the Serbs.
"Here we are," says the Portsmouth detective "seven to eight hundred years later, in sight of Kosovo Polje, with the whole process still going on."
A group of people speaking Serbian shot dead two ethnic Albanian men and wounded another in north-western Kosovo yesterday, a UN spokesman said.