The final toll of civilians confirmed massacred by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo is likely to be under 3,000, far short of the numbers claimed by Nato governments during last year's controversial air strikes on Yugoslavia.

As war crimes experts from Britain and other countries prepare to wind down the exhumation of hundreds of graves in Kosovo on behalf of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, officials concede they have not borne out the worst wartime reports. These were given by refugees and repeated by western government spokesmen during the campaign. They talked of indiscriminate killings and as many as 100,000 civilians missing or taken out of refugee columns by the Serbs.

The fact that far fewer Kosovo Albanians were massacred than suggested by Nato will raise sharp questions about the organisation's handling of the media and its information strategy.

However, commentators yesterday stressed that the new details should not obscure the fact that the major war crime in the tribunal's indictment of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, and four other Serb officials is the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people.

"The point is did we successfully pre-empt or not," Mark Laity, the acting Nato spokesman, said last night. "I think the evidence shows we did. We would rather be criticised for overestimating the numbers who died than for failing to pre-empt. Any objective analysis would say there was a clear crisis. There was indiscriminate killing. There were attempts to clear hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes."

When Yugoslav forces withdrew from Kosovo in June last year, Nato spokesmen estimated that the Serbs had killed at least 10,000 civilians. While the bombing was under way William Cohen, the US defence secretary, announced that 100,000 Kosovo Albanian men of military age were missing after being taken from columns of families being deported to Albania and Macedonia. "They may have been murdered," he said. The fear was they might share the fate of the men who were separated from their wives and children and executed when Serb forces overran the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia.

But while some 7,000 Bosnian Muslims died in the week-long Srebrenica massacre in 1995, less than 3,000 Kosovo Albanian murder victims have been discovered in the whole of Kosovo. "The final number of bodies uncovered will be less than 10,000 and probably more accurately determined as between two and three thousand," Paul Risley, the Hague tribunal's press spokesman, said yesterday.

In three months of digging this summer, the tribunal's international forensic experts found 680 bodies at 150 sites. This was in addition to the 2,108 bodies found at 195 sites last year before exhumations were called off because of winter frosts. "By October we expect to have enough evidence to end the exhumations by foreign teams, and they will not be necessary next year," Mr Risley added.

Although the tribunal has received reports of another 350 suspected grave sites, it believes the cost and effort of uncovering them would not be justified. Some suspicious mounds or patches of rough earth in fields where villagers reported a foul stench turned out to contain dead animals or to be empty.

When the tribunal's teams reached Kosovo last summer, shortly after the international peacekeepers, they were given reports of 11,334 people in mass graves, but the results of its exhumations fall well short of that number. In a few cases, such as the Trepca mine where hundreds of bodies were alleged to have been flung down shafts or incinerated, they found nothing at all.

The tribunal's indictment of President Milosevic includes the charge that during Nato's bombing campaign Serb police shot 105 ethnic Albanian men and boys near the village of Mala Krusa in western Kosovo. Witnesses claimed hay was piled on the bodies and set alight. Tribunal experts believe the remains may have been tampered with later, since the bones of only a few people were found.

Motives questioned



The exhumation of less than 3,000 bodies is sure to add fuel to those who say Nato's intervention against Yugoslavia was not "humanitarian" and that it had other motives such as maintaining its credibility in a post-cold war world. Others say Nato's air strikes revealed a grotesque double standard since western governments did nothing when hundreds of thousands were being massacred in Rwanda.

Carla del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, told the UN security council: "Our task is not to prepare a complete list of war casualties. Our primary task is to gather evidence relevant to criminal charges."

Evidence of the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands of people was overwhelming before the tribunal gained access to Kosovo but the exhumations are aimed at finding evidence for the charges of mass murder.

"Their benefit is to link forensic evidence to particular units of the police and army operating in particular parts of Kosovo. It wasn't a case of rogue units. The Serbian police state was fully involved," Mr Risley said. But officials will not say how many of the 2,788 bodies exhumed show clear signs of being victims of summary execution such as being shot in the head from close range.

No Nato government has sought to produce a definitive total of murdered ethnic Albanian civilians since the Serb offensives began in March 1998, a year before the bombing. "No one is interested," complained a senior international official in Kosovo involved in helping victims' families. "Nato doesn't want to admit the damage wasn't as extensive as it said. Local Albanian politicians have the same motive. If you don't have the true figure, you can exploit the issue."