The victims came from the villages of Korisha/Korisa, Bllaca/Blaca, Budakovs/Budakova, Mushtisht/Mustiste and Grejkoc/Grejkovac in the Suhareka/Suva Reka municipality, and were in the process of trying to escape from Serbian forces when they died.

Most of them were killed when NATO dropped bombs during the night on a refugee encampment in a wooded area on the Prizren-Suhareka/Suva Reka road, near Korisha/Korisa. NATO, which was conducting a campaign of air strikes aimed at forcing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s regime to end its violent repression of Kosovo Albanians, admitted the deadly bombing, saying that it regretted any “accidental civilian casualties”.

Witnesses who survived the attack have claimed that ethnic Albanian civilians were used as human shields by Serbian police in an attempt to prevent a NATO attack.

One survivor, Sokol Ahmetaj, who was 16 at the time, recalled that the night before, on May 12, 1999, civilians who had taken refuge in the surrounding mountains were told that Serbian forces would stage a raid, so they decided to descend to the village in an attempt to escape to Albania.

When they reached a Serbian checkpoint near Korisha/Korisa, they were stopped and ordered to spend the night there, just hours before NATO launched the attack.

Deutsche Welle also broadcast interviews after the incident with survivors who said that Serbian police forced some 600 displaced Kosovo Albanians to serve as human shields in Korisha/Korisa before the attack.

“We were told something bad would happen to us if we left the place,” said an eyewitness interviewed by Deutsche Welle’s Albanian service. He said that Serbian police hinted at what was about to happen. “Now you’ll see what a NATO attack looks like,” he quoted one policeman as saying.

The man said he finally went to sleep underneath a tractor, only to be woken up by explosions and the cries of children and adults.

No one has been indicted for the deaths in Korisha/Korisa so far.