TEHRAN Hundreds of ethnic Albanian mourners gathered in Bela Crkva village in western Kosovo Province on Monday to bury 64 men, women and children executed, mown down or burnt in their homes by Serbs on March 25, Reuters reported. The dead included four children of the Spahiu family aged three, four, seven and 12 and three children of the Zhiniqi family aged five, seven and nine.

They were among a group of 12 people who British war crimes investigators said were killed with gunshots to the back of the head. Relatives of the Zhiniqi children collapsed in hysterics as they gathered outside a school with other mourners to kiss photographs of the dead. The stench of the remains wafted above what was once a scenic rural village but is now reduced in the main to mounds of rubble, wrecked by rampaging Serb forces.

"I will ask you to be strong and not to cry," a man told a group of weeping women. according to local tradition, tears of mourning are considered bad for the souls of the dead. Meanwhile, it was reported that Russia and NATO have removed all "obstacles" in the way of the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo, the Russian Defense Ministry as saying in a statement Monday. "The results of the talks will allow the effective and fruitful military participation of Russia in KFOR," AFP quoted the defense ministry as saying.

The statement added that Kosovo's Pristina airport was ready to receive Russian planes carrying troops effective immediately. Although Russia and the United States clinched a deal in Helsinki last month on the deployment of 3,600 Russian troops in KFOR, new disagreements had surfaced over the presence of the Russian contingent. Some 120 paratroopers that were to fly to Pristina on Sunday remained at a military airport in Ivanovo, east of Moscow, as Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania continued to deny them permission to enter their air space.