Liberation of Kosovo: War Crimes - Dots on a landscape show terrible pattern of atrocity

IT IS like watching a pointillist paint a picture of the unspeakable. With the liberation of Kosovo, each day brings the discovery of new massacre sites, a multiplication of little dots on a map, denoting atrocities committed by President Slobodan Milosevic's forces against the ethnic Albanian population.

More dots were added yesterday. French troops came across human remains in the ruins of a house at Vlastion in south-eastern Kosovo, four wells containing human bodies were found in a village west of the capital, Pristina, and evidence of a massacre of 32 men was discovered in the village of Cysk near Pec. At Vlastion, according to residents, 13 people were killed on 30 April, their corpses left to rot in the rubble.

The wells, for their part, could be the harbinger of even worse. Nearby, villagers say, are five freshly dug pits that could contain victims from a rampage by Serb troops just after the peace agreement was signed on 3 June, in which 100 people may have been slaughtered. Last night, there were more, as yet unconfirmed, reports of 54 people, including 24 children, massacred by a lone Serb policeman at Poklek, near Pristina in March.

The investigation under way is unique in military history. Never before, neither in the Second World War when the Germans were driven from Eastern Europe, nor in 1995 in Bosnia, have investigators gone in with a liberating army to amass evidence of war crimes.

Some, such as David Gowan, the Foreign Office representative co-ordinating Britain's efforts, are there already. Others are on their way. In all, at least 12 teams, from several countries and comprising 300 people, will take part. Britain is sending a 15-strong group headed by a chief superintendent from the Metropolitan Police, whose findings will be passed to prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Suspected sites are already being sealed off by advancing allied troops, while arrests have started - as testified by the detention yesterday by United States troops of two suspected Serb war criminals near the southern Kosovan town of Urosevac. Inevitably, many criminals will slip back into Serbia with the retreating troops and fleeing civilians, but prosecutors claim they will then have nowhere else to run.

Thus far, the number of presumed victims discovered runs to several hundred. But the final total may well be several thousand. Kacanik, where British troops found 81 bodies on Monday, was but one case, Mr Gowan said yesterday. There were many instances where the number of bodies ran "into the hundreds", on the basis of evidence now available. Final figures, inevitably, will be higher.

The best documented cases, based on evidence mostly collected from survivors and witnesses in the refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia, form the basis of the war crimes indictment against President Milosevic and four top Yugoslav officials handed down on 27 May. The indictment lists 340 names of victims from the following eight alleged atrocities:

t Racak (on or about 15 January, and whose discovery led to the failed Rambouillet conference and thus indirectly to the war) - 45 killed;

t Bela Crkva (on or about 25 March) - 77 killed, including 10 women and children;

t Velika Krusa and Mali Krusa (on or about 25 March) - 105 men and boys killed;

t Djakovica (27 March) - six killed;

t Crkolez (27 March) - 20 killed;

t Izbica (27 March) - 130 killed;

t Djakovica, Querim District (2 April) - 20 people killed, including 19 women and children.

Since K-For forces entered Kosovo on Saturday, evidence of these and other atrocities has come to light. The first was Kacanik, where more than 100 ethnic Albanians may have been massacred. On Tuesday, Italian peace-keepers uncovered three mass graves near Pec in western Kosovo, possibly containing 120 bodies. Dutch troops, meanwhile, found the charred remains of 20 people shot in a barn at Velika Krusa. At Kusaj in western Kosovo, ethnic Albanians claim 30 bodies could be buried in mass graves. And so the daily toll mounts.