Focus: Kosovo Peace Deal - Briton in KLA 'kills 24 Serbs'

Western 'volunteers' tell gory tales of hand-to-hand fighting with Russian mercenaries behind the lines

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ECHNICALLY, the British forces who entered Kosovo yesterday were not the first ones in. SAS units were already in place, calling in the massive B-52 bombing raids that helped end the war and checking the terrain for the incoming allied force.

And then, of course, there was Dave Duxbury, a 38-year-old former army soldier and French legionnaire from Accrington. Dave was several miles inside Kosovo, not far from the town of Junik, when the British forces moved in. He had spent the previous few days sheltering from Serb artillery shells or crawling through hillside bushes to snipe at Serb forces from close range. With his Lancashire accent and easy smile, it is hard to imagine him killing the 24 Serbs he says he notched up last week alone. He long ago lost count of his total figure since he joined up last year.

After his wife left him, Dave saw the tragedy of the Kosovo refugees on V, sold his car and backpacked to Albania to fight for the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against the Serbs. He was on the KLA front line near the village of Batushe yesterday when the Nato operation began.

He and his commander, a former Dutch marine from Amsterdam who goes by the nom de guerre of Marco and is a legend in these parts, were trying to set up an organised Spanish Civil War-style International Brigade when peace broke out last week and put their plan on hold. "Don't call us mercenaries," said Dave. "We don't get paid, just a few Deutschmarks for food, petrol, that sort of thing. We started with eight foreigners. Now we've got 30."

hey include a Scottish former Royal Marine called Ronnie and an Englishman called Jimmy who was a veteran of 2 Para and the French foreign legion. "We got an Irishman last month who'd been rejected by the IRA. A 49-year-old Scotsman showed up last week wearing his kilt and carrying a Scottish flag. You'd have thought he was off to a football match. He had no experience but his heart was in the right place. We gave him a [gun], pointed him towards the Serbs and he's doing fine."

Unperturbed by the fact that we were about to eat, Marco, who fought as a mercenary in Bosnia after his Bosnian wife and 18-month-old child were shot there by Serb snipers, pulled out his "family album" to show me gory snapshots of a Russian soldier his men shot recently. Half his face had been blown off but his uniform and epaulettes were Russian and Marco said they found his Russian identity papers. "We think there were hundreds of Russians fighting against us," said Dave, a former Rapier missile marksman with the 12 Air Defence Regiment.

"One of our lads stumbled onto a Russian tent, went in, slit all their throats in rapid succession and brought back one of their heads. We played a bit of football with it during a lull then chucked it back across the front line in a plastic bag."

A front line that last week was only a 30-yard stretch of low hillside. Because of the closeness of the two sides, the KLA men were bombed five times by Nato bombers in recent weeks.

Dave said he had not encountered SAS units - confirmed by other sources - but regularly met British intelligence officers and often bumped into American special forces - usually Rangers - well inside Kosovo.

An undercover British unit, apparently SAS, and a few American Special Forces on an undercover mission to Kosovo had a miraculous escape late on Friday night when their unmarked British Hercules C-130 transport plane crashed and burst into flames only 30 yards from a packed Kosovar refugee camp in the town of Kukes. It was also only a few hundred yards from the Nato billet where hundreds of soldiers, including Britons, are based.

Embarrassed and relieved, Nato officers said publicly they were soldiers on a training mission. But senior military sources here told he Independent the Britons and Americans had landed in pitch blackness and were taking off again at 11.15pm when the plane went down. hey said it was loaded with explosives, which went off in a fireworks-like display as shocked refugees looked on from behind a barbed-wire fence.