Milosevic trial sees BBC footage of prison corpses

Televiion reports from the BBC's Belgrade correspondent, Jacky Rowland, were used yesterday at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, to back claims that Serbian guards used Nato bombings as a cover for the murder of 153 ethnic Albanian prisoners in Kosovo.

The reports from Ms Rowland, due to give evidence to the United Nations tribunal today, showed the corpses of inmates at the Dubrava prison, northwest of the Kosovo town of Istok, in the spring of 1999.

The BBC reporter, who was sworn in yesterday and is appearing at The Hague voluntarily, has said she regards it as her duty and that journalists should not be considered as a special category. But her decision has sparked a controversy over the role of the media in war crimes trials.

The BBC, along with 33 other international organisations, supported an appeal by The Washington Post against a court order compelling one of its retired reporters to testify against his will in another case before the UN court.

The prosecution combined BBC footage with testimony from a former prisoner, Musa Krasniqi. In her broadcasts, Ms Rowland did not say whether the prisoners were shot by guards or killed by Nato bombs, but her reports from two different days in May 1999 were consistent with Mr Krasniqi's testimony.

Mr Krasniqi, who was being held in the Dubrava prison in May 1999, testified that the morning after the bombing inmates were told to gather in a central courtyard to await transfer to another jail.

Without warning, the guards opened fire from a watchtower and began killing them. "We started lining up. About five or six lines of men. It wasn't more than five seconds after that that the hand grenades started falling," Mr Krasniqi said. He added that 153 prisoners were killed in the attack and in additional attacks the following day.

Mr Krasniqi conceded that 19 prisoners had been killed by Nato bombs on 21 May, but insisted that the Serb authorities tried to blame the alliance for the killing of prisoners the next day by the guards.

He said: "They called in a group of Serbian journalists and a Greek journalist, and they counted the bodies and said, 'This is what Nato has done."'

Mr Krasniqi's version of events appeared to be corroborated by Ms Rowland's report filmed on 21 May, when she reported seeing "less than 20" bodies on the prison grounds. In a second report from the prison three days later, Rowland said she was shown another 25 corpses inside a building, as well as the others, which remained where they had been before.

"Our return to Dubrava prison raised as many questions as it answered," she said in her 24 May report. "The prison was badly damaged, and there were no living prisoners. ... I was told it had been bombed all weekend long, and all the prisoners were removed."

Mr Milosevic, who faces about 60 war crime charges including a count of genocide connected with Bosnia, and who is acting as his own defence, called the story a "manipulation" of facts. "This massacre obviously did not take place," he said, repeating charges that Nato targeted civilians in its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

The Kosovo phase of the Milosevic trial, which began in February, is due to conclude next month, when the prosecution will move on to charges related to the earlier wars in Croatia and Bosnia.