The missing bodies of women and children that came back to haunt him

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In the end, it was the missing witnesses who brought down Slobodan Milosevic ­ the women and children whom his forces brutally murdered in Kosovo, and whose bodies mysteriously disappeared.

Vjollca Berisha's children, whom she has not seen since she lay in their blood in the back of a lorry piled high with bodies. Nexhat Bytyqi's grandson, who vanished without trace after Mr Bytyqi slipped out for water. Shefqet Gashi's 77-year-old father, shot down on his doorstep.

These are the silent witnesses who brought the man Serbs once called the Master of Life and Death to his humiliating finale yesterday, in a plane heading for The Hague to answer to the international war crimes tribunal.

The remains that have begun to emerge from mass graves just a few minutes' drive outside Belgrade finally turned Serb opinion in favour of extraditing the man they once hailed as a saviour, and have provided the tribunal with the "smoking gun" it needs to prove Mr Milosevic's responsibility for massacres in Kosovo.

Ms Berisha was too traumatised to speak of her missing children when The Independent visited her last month. Her father told her story, while she quietly cried. Her children were rounded up with 50 people by Serb forces and killed in a pizzeria in their home town of Suha Reka. Some were shot; others died when a grenade was thrown into the restaurant. Ms Berisha was in the pizzeria but survived. The Serbs took the bodies and piled them on to a lorry. Ms Berisha jumped to safety with a son who was still alive. Her other two children disappeared.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies disappeared from Kosovo during the Nato air strikes in 1999. In many cases, Albanians saw their loved ones buried, or even dug the graves themselves. But when they returned to show the graves to investigators from The Hague, they were empty.

Some Western media even accused Albanians such as Ms Berisha of inventing the massacres. Then, in May this year, Zivadin Djordjevic, a Serb diver, revealed one of the best-kept secrets in Serbia. In April 1999, he was one of a team who salvaged a refrigerator lorry from the Danube. At first they thought it had crashed. But when they opened it, they found the bodies of more than 80 Albanians.

The truth began to come out. A Serbian police investigation discovered that, at a secret meeting in March 1999, Mr Milosevic ordered his Interior Minister, Vlajko Stojiljkovic, to get rid of any bodies that could be used as evidence at The Hague.

As the Nato bombs rained down, body-snatchers roamed Kosovo. Mete Krasniqi saw them in action, after Serb forces machine-gunned the inhabitants of his village, including his son. The villagers buried them. A month later, hiding in the woods, they saw men in orange overalls dig up the bodies and load them into two lorries.

A Yugoslav army reservist identified only as "Nikola" told the Serbian magazine Vreme that he made a dozen trips between a military camp near Pristina and the remote Serbian mining town of Bor during the air strikes, driving a refrigerator lorry full of bodies. With two friends, he opened the lorry and took gruesome photographs of the evidence. The journalist who interviewed "Nikola" claims he is already in The Hague, waiting to testify against Mr Milosevic.

Some of the bodies the Hague tribunal was so desperate to find had been hidden just outside the Serbian capital, in the 13th of May military compound at Batojnica. More graves are being excavated around Serbia. It is possible that in one of them lie Vjollca Berisha's children.