Milosevic's Army 'shot Baby in Village Massacre'

Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial heard a Yugoslav soldier describe yesterday how he took part in the massacre of a group of Kosovan Albanian civilians which included a baby who "screamed unbelievably loudly" after being shot.

In one of the most harrowing accounts given to the Hague tribunal, the unidentified witness said he was with the Yugoslav army unit which entered the village of Trjne on March 25 1999, just as Nato began bombing.

While Mr Milosevic, who is charged on 66 counts of crimes against humanity and genocide, listened in the dock, the man identified as K41 said the captain commanding his unit of 80-100 soldiers had ordered that "on that day no one should remain alive there".

K41's image was distorted to make him unrecognisable on the court's television screen and internet transmissions.

He said houses and a haystack were set alight and Albanian men were shot on sight. The troops then carried out house-to-house searches and forced 15 people into the courtyard. They included women, elderly people and a baby.

"There was at least one baby," he said. "The people who were shot all began falling across one another. What I remember most vividly is how ... there was a baby and it had been shot with three bullets and it was screaming unbelievably loudly."

The witness ignored a warning by the British judge, Richard May, that he might be incriminating himself, insisting that he wanted to clear his conscience.

"Never a night goes by without my dreaming about that child," he said.

He said his sergeant ordered another soldier to shoot an old man. When the soldier refused the sergeant shot the old man in the head himself, saying: "This is how it's done."

The prosecution is seeking to prove that Mr Milosevic, who was then president of Yugoslavia and supreme commander of the Yugoslav army, spearheaded massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

He insists that his forces were fighting the Kosovo Liberation Army in a legitimate counter-insurgency operation and that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo to escape Nato bombing.

K41 said he had been told that KLA fighters could be in the villages but he did not see any. "At no point was there any shooting ... Nor did we come across any uniforms or rifles which would mean there had been KLA soldiers there."

He was serving with the Yugoslav army's 549th motorised brigade in Prizren, 50 miles south of the Kosovan capital Pristina, when the massacre occurred.

Mr Milosevic replied that Colonel Bozidar Delic, commander of the brigade, had repeatedly ordered his soldiers to obey the 1949 Geneva conventions on the conduct of war.