The media has played the key role in how what we saw that day has been reported to the public. After we left the third attack site, the tour bus suddenly did a U-turn and headed back toward the southeast, in the direction of Prizren. I noticed the change of course immediately, because our guides had only about 30 minutes earlier told me to brace myself for the fourth and last site after seeing how pale I was after visiting the third.

I bolted down to the bottom level of the double-decker bus and asked the army press center spokeswoman why we were turning back. She said that the journalists had demanded to return to Belgrade and that the trip had to be cut short in order to return immediately. When I complained that IMCnews had not been consulted, the response was "CNN and ITN insisted". Something seemed strange. I demanded a vote be taken. On the bottom level of the bus, only a few journalists raised their hands in favor of returning without visiting the worst attack site. However, upstairs, a clear majority, many from the United States or Britain, voted to return to Belgrade. I accepted the result and reported it to the press center guide.

IMCnews photo chief Ayuri Sakamoto and I were surprised by the decision to return. Of course we knew that many journalists had to meet deadlines for their stories. But the site of the worst attack was less than 30 minutes away after we had already traveled for more than ten hours from Belgrade.

We had also heard some reporters grumbling about having seen only about 20 bodies from the total of 72 dead claimed by the Yugoslav Army. Obviously, the veracity of the death figures could best be checked by seeing the worst attack site, and yet the same journalists who had been saying they had not seen enough bodies were among those who voted against going forward. Then, one correspondent from a top international network asked me if I had heard about "a respected English journalist" who was rumored to be saying that some of the dead looked as if they had been killed by machine guns rather than by aerial bombardment. It looked as if a "fix" was in. I suspected that such inconsistencies in reporters' observations might be manipulated for propaganda purposes by NATO.

I had already been blocked by my fellow journalists from observing the final attack site. At least I was going to find the journalist said to be claiming to have seen victims that had been machine-gunned. I traced the rumor back to a British journalist who was working in team with his wife. Coincidentally, I had spoken with them earlier when they needed a translation of a survivor's remarks because they spoke neither Serbo-Croatian nor Albanian.

I introduced myself. Then came a big surprise: he was Robert Fisk, a well-known English newspaper journalist whose excellent writing style has long been my envy. I asked if he had reported that the dead were machine-gunned. He said he had found clear signs that an airplane had strafed the second attack site and he drew a sketch of where he said he had seen "machine-gun" fire on the ground. I told him that none of the dead that I had seen looked to have been killed by bullets, nor had I heard any witness speak of low-flying strafing aircraft. I also said that using the term "machine gun" instead of "cannon" to describe airplane guns was an invitation to NATO to claim that Yugoslav troops might have executed the refugees by "machine gun".

I told him that part of the IMCnews mission is to report our observations and that another part of our job is report about how other journalists present their observations. I offered him the address of this website and invited him to respond to our coverage.

I found Fisk's report in the Independent the next day. Although he clearly blamed NATO for the air strike, he also wrote, "And several of the dead along the road appeared to have been attacked by machine-gun fire." Within hours, NATO was using that excerpt from Fisk's report to justify saying that the dead had been machine-gunned and had not been killed by NATO aircraft. NATO also selectively quoted other journalists from the bus as saying they had only seen 20 bodies. Bit it did not report that those same journalists had refused to travel to the last attack site. The truth about the extent of the massacre was effectively obscured by the NATO disinformation.

Although we were told not take photos from the double-decker bus during our trip, the ban was not strictly enforced and when we arrived at our destination, we were free to film whatever we liked. We also managed to hear the accounts of several witnesses and survivors of the attack out of earshot of our guides.

Those accounts were consistent: there had been no warning before NATO jets attacked. Survivors also asserted that their convoy, which was kilometers in length, was composed only of civilian vehicles. Asked if they had been traveling to find refuge outside Yugoslavia, one ethnic Albanian said in Serbo-Croatian, "Why would I want to go? I have a job here."

The first journalists on the scene were television crews from Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, whose locally hired cameramen operate with an army escort. The rest of the foreign media arrived by bus with us. Video footage of the scene shot by AP on the day of the attack showed many more bodies than we saw. Both the authorities and the survivors independently told us that most of the ethnic-Albanian families had already claimed their dead.