The killing of 45 ethnic Albanian men and women in Racak proved a major turning point on the road to confrontation - and is included in the Milosevic indictment.

Monitors found 22 of the dead, all of whom were wearing civilian clothes, in a gully outside the village. A further 23 of the victims were reported executed in the streets of the village and were all unarmed.

The BBC's Jacky Rowland who visited the scene reported that most of the victims were too old to be of fighting age.

Jacky Rowland in Racak: "I counted the bodies, they were all men"

Villagers said that Serbian police shot the majority of the men at close range with a bullet to the head or neck. The attack may have been in revenge for a KLA ambush near Stimlje on 8 January in which three Serbian policemen were killed.

A Serbian pathologist said that the men had not been massacred but a later report prepared by an independent Finnish team said that the bodies might have been tampered with. The massacre was a warning of what was to come.

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