Six-week-old Diturije Deliu sleeps gently in her crib decorated with flowers - the sole survivor of a barbarous frenzy that left her mother, sister and brother slaughtered.

When the Serbs launched an attack near the village of Obrinje in central Kosovo 10 days ago, Mr Ymer Deliu sent his wife Lumnije, 30, with baby Diturije, their daughter Menduhije, 4, and 10-year-old son Jeton, to nearby woods to build a shelter. They were joined by more than a dozen relatives.

The menfolk of the village also fled, but to a different area, thinking their families would be safer if no men of fighting age were with them.

Last Monday, after several days in hiding, Mr Deliu ventured at dawn to the clearing where his family had been living in a makeshift tent. The scene that met him was so gruesome that newspapers and television teams who visited the site could not use some of the images.

Jeton had had his throat cut. Mr Deliu's pregnant sister-in-law, Luljeta, 28, had been beaten to death, her swollen abdomen stabbed. Four-year-old Menduhije had been stabbed in the back, her ponytail cut off and stuffed in her mouth.

Scattered around the small clearing, or lying dead in corners, lay 15 other members of his extended family, among them his wife, Lumnije, her neck slashed, her back stabbed. Diturije lay in her mother's blood-stained arms.

"I was sure she was dead like all the others," Mr Deliu said. "Her face was smeared in blood and there was blood in her mouth.

"But then she opened her eyes and looked at me. I looked for signs of blood on her romper suit and could not see any. Then I realised that the blood had been smeared on to her."

On Sunday, Mr Deliu showed where each member of the family had been murdered. Chain-smoking but otherwise calm, he said: "I have not cried, not once. I want to be precise and only say what I know.

"One day I will say the same thing in The Hague" - a reference to the international war crimes tribunal there.

"The only thing I have done is that I wear my son's watch along with my own. It still has his blood on it and I don't want it to get washed off."

Mr Deliu's account has been corroborated by international journalists and diplomats who went to the scene. The massacre has provoked a new political determination in the West to act against the forces of the Yugoslav president, Mr Slobodan Milosevic.

The remains of Mr Deliu's family and friends are buried in a field near where they hid. In place of headstones, he has put the shoes that each was wearing when he or she died. Diturije is being cared for by relatives.

- The Telegraph, London