Dozens of Kosovo Albanians Killed in Nighttime Air Raid

At least 53 Kosovo Albanian refugees, a number of them children, were killed here when their roadside camp was bombed late Thursday in an area that had been under intense NATO airstrikes for days.

After an extensive investigation that lasted until early today, NATO accepted responsibility for attacking Korisa but said it was a legitimate target--”a military camp and command post.”

The attack injured 61 Kosovo Albanians. Several survivors said 100 or more people might have died in the bombing.

“Military equipment including an armored personnel carrier and more than 10 pieces of artillery were observed at this location,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in a statement. “The aircraft observed dug-in military positions at the target before executing the attack.

“This was a legitimate military target,” Shea stressed in his statement. “NATO deeply regrets accidental civilian casualties that were caused by this attack.”

The NATO official said the alliance investigation could not confirm the casualty figures released by Yugoslav authorities and said it could furnish no explanation for why civilians were at the site at the time of the attack.

Charred bomb fragments, such as an aluminum fin, found at the scene resembled those left behind after previous North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes in Kosovo.

The bombing came on the heaviest night yet of NATO air raids on Yugoslavia.

Many of the refugees in Korisa were asleep when explosions sprayed shrapnel and flames everywhere, survivors said. Mattresses left behind in covered wagons and in the dirt underneath were soaked with blood.

At least a dozen children were among the dead. An infant buttoned up in terry cloth sleepers lay among the corpses that filled the local morgue.

Another child was incinerated in the fire that swept through the camp. The child’s carbonized body was still lying on the ground Friday morning, beside that of an adult, in the middle of a tangle of farmers’ tractors and wagons that were still burning 12 hours after the attack.

Survivors said about 430 Kosovo refugees had camped out for the night in a lot while 200 others slept in a nearby motel. The refugees had come out of the mountain woods, where they had been hiding for a month until they began to run out of food.

The ethnic Albanians did not say why they had fled their villages in the first place. They blamed “the situation,” without accusing either Yugoslav security forces, NATO’s bombing or both for driving them from their homes.

What mattered to the refugees was that they had gained official permission earlier Thursday to return to their homes in and around Korisa, said survivor Hasan Ahmetaj, 55.

“We were out there [hiding] for four weeks, and we didn’t have much left to eat,” he said through a translator. “So we talked to the police commander in [nearby] Ljubizda. He told us: ‘Sure, you can come, and we will talk. You can go back to your houses if you want or you can go to Albania.’

“But he said, ‘If you want to cross into Albania, you cannot because the border is closed, so it would be better if you returned to your houses.’ ”

Ahmetaj’s wife and two daughters suffered leg and arm injuries and were among the patients Friday at a hospital in the city of Prizren, about three miles south of Korisa.

So many of the refugees were forced to camp out for the night while organizing their return because many homes in their villages had been destroyed, said Zecir Urimeraj, 62.

Urimeraj was asleep in his tractor wagon, while most of his relatives were in the motel, when the first bomb or missile fell. As he ran toward the motel, a second explosion changed his mind and he fled toward a field instead.

When Urimeraj returned Friday morning, he found the bodies of three family members among the dead.

The lot was a horrific mess of twisted metal and pieces of flesh scattered among bread rolls, macaroni, plates and clothes that had spilled out of cartons and suitcases.

Only half a dozen tractors and wagons farthest from the blasts were still intact, but some of the people sheltering inside couldn’t escape the jagged pieces of shrapnel that flew in every direction.

Several survivors said in interviews that they heard five explosions during the airstrike and that, even as people fled into the fields on the other side of a two-lane road, the bombs kept falling.

Of the 61 wounded victims in Prizren’s hospital, most had fractured limbs and spines and suffered second- and third-degree burns, said Dr. Dragan Soutic, the hospital’s director.

The attack came on its busiest night of airstrikes, including particularly heavy raids around the town of Prizren early Thursday and around Stimlje, about 20 miles northeast, at night.

NATO originally intended Friday to use its usual 3 p.m. news briefing in Brussels to describe atrocities that the alliance alleges are being carried out by Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s soldiers, police and paramilitary forces against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

Instead, alliance spokesmen were harried with questions about NATO’s own actions.

“NATO does not target civilians. Let’s be perfectly clear about that,” alliance spokesman Shea said.

On Friday, both British and NATO officials cited unconfirmed reports that Kosovar refugees had been stationed by the Serbs as human shields on bridges to safeguard them from the NATO airstrikes.

Serbian accusations were that NATO warplanes attacked Korisa with cluster bombs. But NATO sources said that type of munition was not used in the area of the village at the time of the attack, and said five ethnic Albanian hamlets, Korisa among them, had been subjected to Serbian shelling around the same time.

The alliance air campaign, which entered its 53rd day Friday, has suffered a series of miscues.

On April 14, NATO mistakenly bombed a column of ethnic Albanian refugees on a road near Korisa. Yugoslav authorities said that 75 people died in several attacks that day, though NATO officials acknowledged only that one pilot mistakenly bombed a tractor pulling a wagonload of refugees.

A week ago, NATO aircraft bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, killing three Chinese journalists.

At a Pentagon news conference Friday, Gen. John Jumper, the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, defended the alliance’s record, saying NATO forces in the Balkans have produced “the best results we have ever seen” in terms of avoiding killing or wounding civilians.

“We have flown, I believe, approaching 20,000 sorties,” Jumper said. “I think maybe on 10 to 12 of those 20,000 or so sorties, we have had ‘collateral damage’ that has been an issue.”

Meanwhile, NATO officials in Brussels said 679 sorties were flown by allied warplanes in the 24-hour period ending Friday morning, including 237 strikes on Yugoslav troops, tanks, armored and other vehicles, artillery pieces and other military targets in Kosovo.

Special graphite bombs were dropped on power facilities at five locales--Veliki Crljeni, Obrenovac, Nis, Drmno and Novi Sad. The state-of-the-art U.S. weapon does not destroy generators or transmitters but spews filaments that trigger short circuits, military sources say.

Yugoslav media reported that the attacks late Thursday knocked out power in several districts of Belgrade, Nis and Novi Sad as well as in many other regions.

NATO said its planes also bombed an SA-6 surface-to-air missile battery, several radar sites, three airfields, three military radio relay sites, two highway bridges, and petroleum and munitions storage sites.

Since the start of Operation Allied Force on March 24, NATO planes have flown 20,772 missions--7,135 of which have been bomb or missile runs.

In other developments:

* A week after the NATO missile attack on China’s embassy in Belgrade, the U.N. Security Council late Friday issued a formal statement expressing “profound regrets” and “deep sorrow” but omitting any condemnation.

The statement, the result of tortuous negotiations between China and the United States, was a watered-down version of a text proposed by Beijing that would have “strongly condemned” the bombing and called it a “blatant encroachment” on the sovereignty of a U.N. member.

* Earlier Friday, Chinese President Jiang Zemin finally accepted a telephone call from President Clinton after refusing to talk to the U.S. president since last weekend’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy. White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart described the half-hour conversation as “constructive.”

* The Pentagon and the State Department confirmed that Russia has broken off some military-to-military contacts to protest the NATO bombing campaign. But the administration insisted that key contacts have been maintained.

*

Watson reported from Korisa and Dahlburg from Brussels. Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.

All of Paul Watson’s dispatches from Kosovo are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/dispatch.