They say the police took them to the hill above the village and shot them. "The police told us to run," one of the survivors told the BBC, "and as soon as we started running, they started to shoot."

Our correspondent was among the first journalists to arrive in the village. "I counted more than 20 bodies lying in a gully on a hill. All the victims were men, most of them had been shot in the head or the neck," she reported.

"None of them was wearing uniform and some of the men were above fighting age."

"I've seen all the ingredients of a massacre ... a lot of bodies up there, a lot of men who have been shot in various ways, but mostly very close up ... It's horrendous. It's a horrible sight," Mr Walker said. Asked who had committed the crime, Walker said that the villagers told the OSCE officials "it was the Serbian police."

"As a layman it looks like executions, it looks like people with absolutely no value for human life murdering these men, who to me look like farmers, they look like workmen, they look like villagers who certainly did not deserve to die in this fashion," Mr Walker said.

Mr Drewienkiewicz said: "This is not war as anyone knows it, these are old men, most of them in their work clothes. I don't know who did this, but this is not normal."

The Serbian authorities issued a statement suggesting the bodies are those of armed rebels killed in combat.

Without referring directly to the bodies discovered at Racak the statement says: "Ethnic Albanian terrorist groups had opened fire with automatic weapons, hand-held rocket launchers and mortars on the police ... from trenches, bunkers and fortifications. The police responded and crushed the terrorists."

"Several dozen terrorists were killed in the clashes with the police. Most of them were in uniforms bearing the insignia of the ethnic Albanian terrorist organization calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)," the statement said.

He said Mr Walker "took advantage of the absence of judicial and other state authorities to make a statement containing falsehoods and personal assessments which are totally baseless."

"It is indisputably clear that the police were provoked and compelled to defend themselves from terrorist attacks," he said.

"Not a single body bears any sign of execution," Dr Sasa Dobricanin said. "The bodies were not massacred."

"That is the only way of detecting bullets. Since I have been working earlier in Pristina, I know the local experts and authorities have no access to x-ray facilities," said Dr Helena Ranta, head of the Finnish team. "Knowing their facilities, I think it is a bit immature to give statements like that," Dr Ranta said.

Her team would report within 10 days, she said.