A WOMAN aid worker from East Lancashire who helped dozens of Kosovo refugees to safety today told how Serbs were using people as human shields in the strife-torn Balkan conflict.

Just days after returning home, Kate Ogden, 37, of Castle Road, Colne, revealed the Lancashire Evening Telegraph how frightened refugees had recounted harrowing tales of murder and rape.

The refugees also told her how their villages were burned and how Serb troops pillaged their homes as they poured into camps in Albania where she was working as a nutritionist for the international charity Action Against Hunger.

Kate also said a translator working with her had been smashed in the face with a rifle butt by a Serb soldier and that young girls and women tried to make themselves unattractive so they would not be singled out for rape.

She said: "Many, many people have been killed.

"There have been massacres where people have lost their mother, father and relatives. I saw one tractor load of around 30 people who were all crying, completely distressed, and you wonder what horrors they had seen."

Kate said she had heard that the Serb soldiers, police and paramilitaries had been described as acting like "animals."

She said: "It's a phrase I've heard in Chechnya and Africa and now the situation in Albania is beginning to get to the depths of African barbarity to the point where they don't care who they kill.

"The Serbs are using people as human shields. There can't be that many Kosovars left in Kosovo and among the ones that are left, at least some are being used as human shields.

"The situation now in Albania is getting more and more tense. You can see the Serbs digging trenches along the border and the tensions between the Albanians and the refugees is rising."

Kate said people she had spoken to still backed the NATO action against the Serbs despite the civilian casualties.

"They say NATO was right to do what it has done," she added.

Kate arrived in Albania on April 4 just after NATO launched its air strikes. She was based in Kukech, just 45 minutes from the Kosovo border, and saw the town grow in size from 20,000 to 100,000 in a matter of weeks as thousands of refugees poured over the border.

"People are becoming more and more traumatised, " she explained.

"Some were completely stunned. They said they were only half a person. They they feel sadness at leaving their homes and at the same time relief that they were safe.

"They all looked forward to the day when they could return to their homes but you wonder what they will go back to."

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