Yugoslavia has this evening broken off diplomatic relations with Albania, accusing Tirana of complicity in the NATO air offensive. The Yugoslav move comes as NATO claims that it has inflicted enormous damage on the country's infrastructure, after 25 nights of bombing. NATO has said that Yugoslavia's air defences had been reduced what it described as an ad-hoc and makeshift level. It said that in one raid, 13 Yugoslav armoured vehicles had been destroyed.
NATO has claimed that Kosovar Albanians are being used to dig graves for their compatriots killed by Serbian forces. Speaking at the alliance's daily news briefing in Brussels, Brigadier-General Giuseppe Marani of Italy said that independent evidence supported the reports. He said that the Albanians were forced to wear red-orange coloured jackets to identify them as members of grave-digging parties. He said that the task involved digging rows of graves facing Mecca. NATO also said that it has aerial evidence of mass graves inside Kosovo. At the alliance's daily news briefing in Brussels, the Italian general said that alliance aircraft had detected 43 such graves.
NATO said ealier that its warplanes struck at over thirty targets in Yugoslavia in the past twenty-four hours. The main targets were in the capital, Belgrade, and the country's second city, Novi Sad. There were reports that a three-year-old girl was killed in Belgrade. The targets hit included roads, fuel facilities, airfields, radar sites and anti-aircraft missile sites. One refinery in the city of Panchevo is still burning after coming under intense bombardment. Officials in Brussels said that poor weather has forced the cancellation of some missions this morning.
The Yugoslav news agency, Tanjug, said the capital was threatened by serious air pollution following the bombing. The main motorway from Belgrade to the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, was also attacked, as was the site of a military airport at Batajnica. Novi Sad was said to have suffered its fiercest bombardment of the NATO campaign, with the city's oil refinery being attacked twice overnight.
The Defence Department in Washington has added to the controversy over NATO's accidental bombing of a refugee column in Kosovo last week. Officials in Washington now say that they made a mistake when they released the recording of a pilot. The Pentagon says that he was not in fact describing the attack on the refugee column, but a different air-strike.
