Mourning Rinas, Child Casualty of the Kosovo War

On April 6, the Yugoslav Army surrounded Mojstir, which before the war was an ethnically-mixed Albanian/Serb village. The troops threw grenades at houses where the remaining ethnic Albanians had gathered.

"When the first grenade exploded, my father-in-law died immediately. Then other grenades hit me and others. I saw Rinas's stomach explode," Musaj told BIRN at her house in Mojstir.

"I told my sister-in-law to pick the other children up and try to run away over the mountain. I decided to die alongside my son," she said.

With the men having already fled to the mountain, soldiers besieged the wounded women and children from the village who hadn't been able to make it.

"Rinas just screamed: 'Oh Mum, it hurts a lot.' I kept telling him that it would pass. I tried to take him in my arms, but the grenades had hit him badly, along with our 20-year-old neighbour Ganimete," Musaj recalled.

She tried to walk silently with her son to get to the foot of the mountain, but she couldn't make it.

The soldiers had tightened their cordon and kept on throwing grenades "from all directions", she said.

She does not clearly recall how many times she lost consciousness and woke up in agony on the night between April 6 and 7, but she does remember her son crying and calling her and his father to tell them that he had lost his sight.

"After a while, he stopped," she said.

In the morning, the soldiers took the bodies of the three people who died - Rinas, her father-in law and her neighbour - and put them in a house, then left the village under the control of police officers and four armed Serb villagers who had joined the police.

"One of our Serb neighbours, Obrad Bajnovic, came at some point in the afternoon and took me into his...