Scores of ethnic-Albanian Yugoslavs were killed by attacking NATO aircraft along a road in southwestern Kosovo on Wednesday, April 14. In a series of attacks, jets fired high explosives on a column of thousands of ethnic Albanians traveling in a convoy of buses, cars and tractors between Djakovica and Prizren.

Citing a figure of 72 dead, Yugoslav media accused NATO of deliberately committing the largest massacre in the three years since separatist Albanian guerrillas made their first attack on Serb civilians. NATO authorities initially denied responsibility and U.S. President Bill Clinton dismissed the killings as "regrettable, but inevitable." NATO said that any dead were "collateral damage" from a legitimate attack on a military convoy. IMCnews has prepared a detailed report on the massacre.

Photo credit, A. Sakamoto

The blacked form of a man was sitting upright at the steering wheel of a tractor, his hands seared to the wheel at Terziski Most, Bistrazin.

Foreign journalists in Belgrade were told at midnight on the day of the attack that an escorted bus would carry reporters to the scene the next day. IMCnews photo chief Ayuri Sakamoto and I arrived in Prizren at about 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 15, after leaving Belgrade before 6:00 a.m.

Upon arrival in Prizren, we were led to a hospital where we were shown six corpses covered by white sheets pulled back to reveal horrific injuries. Especially difficult to look at were the bodies of a young woman and a 7-year-old girl whose face was disfigured by the bombing. The dead were among those killed at the easternmost of four separate attack sites.

We also visited survivors. All six women and three children in the first room we entered were ethnic Albanian. A young woman said she had been traveling on a farm vehicle and cart that was carrying 35 people when the bombs fell. She said several people in that group were killed. Her own bloodied leg was bandaged in two places. The older women had bandages on their heads and hands. Their faces were covered in dried blood. Three pre-school-age girls huddled together on a single bed. The children were the only ones in the room not to show visible wounds.

The survivors had been brought to the hospital from less than half an hour's drive west of Prizren. Burned-out red farm tractors and carts were still visible along the road at the site. One tractor and cart was tilted part-way up a railway embankment about 30 meters off the road, looking as if the occupants had tried to escape the bombs. The fact that their tractor was still there is evidence that they did not. Shoes, boots, sweaters and other personal effects were strewn about along the road and around the vehicles.

Our bus quickly proceeded to the next attack site, where a 4-meter-wide crater at the edge of the road was surrounded by concentric rings of impact points from explosive particles. The bomb had blasted away pavement and ripped apart a truck. Yugoslav Army Col. Slobodan Stojanovic said the weapons used had contained multiple explosives designed to do maximum damage to objects and people all around the point of impact.

A white Mercedes-Benz sedan that had been traveling west stood on the road, windows blown out and its sides perforated. About 50 meters further up the road the hulk of a tractor had been completely burned. The corpse of a man who looked to have been about 50 years old lay unclaimed where it had been thrown up against a tree at the edge of the road. His legs had been blown off.

I wanted to stay longer to investigate the site, but journalists from CNN and the English television network ITN were pushing for the bus to move on to meet their deadlines. We proceeded to the next site.

The third site was worse. I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen it myself. Now, I can never forget it.

The blacked form of a man was sitting upright at the steering wheel of a tractor, his hands seared to the wheel. His clothes, hair and skin had been burned off, there was a large gaping hole in his lower back. Behind him, two human legs dangled over the rear gate of a hay cart hitched to the tractor. The legs were unclothed, feet bare, visible up to the knee. The flesh was burned but intact. I walked closer and almost stepped on what looked like brains splattered on the roadway. I had to stand still to slow my breathing.

I approached again and saw the unimaginable: the two legs hanging out of the cart were connected at the knees only to charred skeletons. NATO had scored a direct hit on the cart and all inside were reduced to bones by the inferno. The undecayed flesh on the legs dangling outside was the only way to know that those in the cart had a day earlier been parents and their children. It looked as if there were the remains of several people in the cart.

I remembered how as a child I had seen the Vietnam War photo of a young girl running naked and screaming down a road after U.S. planes dropped napalm on her. I later read that the girl had survived, although severely disfigured. Under the hay cart on this dusty road in Kosovo I found another girl burned alive by U.S. bombs. She had not survived. I don't know how I instantly knew she was a little girl and not a boy -- perhaps because of the gentle look of how she was curled up, her fingers clenched into small fists. She was locked in her death position, fused into a carbonized black mass.

Down a grassy embankment, a man's head lay on the ground before me, his eyes open. His head had not been neatly cut off by some sharp-edged debris -- it had instead been ripped off and blown away by the blast. NATO officials in Brussels had been claiming for weeks that men were mysteriously absent from the columns of refugees in Kosovo. They had been alleging that Yugoslav defense forces had separated out all the men, had killed them, and had buried them in mass graves. That head looking at me from the ground told me that I had found some of those supposedly "missing" men. Sadly, it also told me that NATO bombs had found them first.

There were other men's bodies among the dead. One lay partly covered by a blanket, looking straight up at the sky. The top of his skull was blasted off -- the brain cavity empty. His mouth was slightly open. Next to him there were women. I also found a leg, still wearing a shoe.

At the three sites we visited, I saw various particles of what appeared to be rocket or bomb parts lying in and around the impact craters. Weapons parts found at the attack sites all bore English-language inscriptions, at least two of which were unmistakably of U.S. origin.

Journalists found a 30-cm-square piece of light metal bearing the following inscription:

--For use on MK-82
--date MFG 3/78
--Wing Assembly 96214 ASSY 872128-1
--Serial Number 78-201872

I traced those markings. The MK-82, or Mark-82, is a U.S. air-to-surface missile. Also known as the GBU-12 "Paveway II" guided bomb, the weapon is a 500 lb. version of the Paveway munitions family of the U.S. inventory. In the Gulf War they were called "Tank-plinkers". The bomb fragment we journalists found on that Kosovo road was manufactured in March 1978. I saw another piece of debris bearing a company name ending in the letters "TER", followed by "CO., INC." There was never any doubt that the weapons that killed those refugees came from the NATO arsenal. Nor was there any doubt that death came from the sky.