[3][4][5] The Serbian government refused to let a war crimes prosecutor visit the site,[6][7] and maintained that the casualties were all members of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) killed in combat with state security forces.

The lead Finnish investigator, anthropology expert Dr. Helena Ranta, called it a "crime against humanity", though refusing as a scientist to directly label it a massacre or assign blame to any specific party.

[7][12] Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, condemned the massacre as a deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder,[13] and the administration sought to convince the American people that intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary.

[3] NATO's involvement in the Kosovo conflict in the months following the Račak incident altogether lasted 78 days and consisted of a series of tactical airstrikes.

[17] On 15 January, reports were received by the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), an unarmed observer force from the OSCE, of civilians being killed in Račak.

Accompanied by a number of foreign journalists and members of the European Union's Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM), they found a total of 40 bodies in and around the village.

"[22] Two days later, on 18 January, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Louise Arbour, attempted to enter Kosovo to investigate the killings but was refused access by Serbian authorities.

[23] On the same day, heavily armed Serbian police entered Račak under fire from the KLA, and removed the bodies, taking them to a morgue in Pristina to await a forensic examination.

In its indictment of Slobodan Milošević and four other senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials, the ICTY's Chief Prosecutor stated that: On or about 15 January 1999, in the early morning hours, the village of Račak was attacked by forces of the FRY [Yugoslavia] and Serbia.

After shelling by VJ [Yugoslav Army] units, the Serbian police entered the village later in the morning and began conducting house-to-house searches.

The British journalist Julius Strauss, writing for The Daily Telegraph, described how he had "spent more than a week collecting evidence on the Račak massacre from Albanian witnesses, Western monitors and diplomats and a few Serbian sources who spoke privately and at some risk.

"[27] According to the survivors that he interviewed, "a small group of men dressed all in black and wearing gloves and balaclavas ... co-ordinated the attack on the village and the subsequent executions."

[28] Some eyewitnesses told reporters that "Serb troops shot and mutilated their victims, and the six-hour orgy of violence ended with a nationalist song.

On the day after the killings, the Serbian Interior Ministry issued a statement asserting that its police units had come under fire from "ethnic Albanian terrorist groups ... on routes leading to Račak village in the Stimlje municipality."

Two French journalists from the Agence France Press and Le Figaro interviewed the cameramen and saw at least some of the footage, from which they concluded that it was possible that the KLA could have staged the massacre, and that "only a credible international inquiry would make it possible to resolve those doubts."

[33] The Serbian media took a similar line, arguing that the Albanians had removed the KLA uniforms from the bodies and replaced them with civilian clothes.

[citation needed] At the end of January 1999, the United States was reported to have leaked telephone intercepts that were said to prove the role of the Serb government in the killings.

[35] Three forensic examinations were carried out on the bodies, by separate teams from FR Yugoslavia, Belarus (at the time an ally of Serbia) and Finland (under the auspices of the European Union).

[37] The Finnish (EU) team, headed by pathologist Helena Ranta, began its own autopsy on 21 January[38] and released its initial findings on 17 March.

The report was widely understood as saying that the Finnish team had disproved the finding released by the Yugoslav and Belarusian pathologists, whose tests had shown a positive for gunshot residue on the hands of 37 out of the 40 bodies.

[43] The international reaction to the Yugoslav and Belarusian report on one hand, (which supported the view that those killed were KLA fighters, not civilians as claimed by the Kosovo-Albanians and NATO) and that of the EU expert team on the other (which did not find any evidence to suggest that the dead were combatants)[44] differed considerably, not least in the NATO-countries who were preparing to intervene to stop widespread human rights violations in Kosovo.

[45] In October 2008 Helena Ranta stated that she had been asked to modify the contents of her report, both by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and by William Walker, the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission, in order to make it more explicit, she had refused to do so, saying this was "a task for the war crimes tribunal”.

According to Ranta, in the winter of 1999 William Walker, the head of the OSCE Kosovo monitoring mission, broke a pencil in two and threw the pieces at her when she was not willing to use sufficiently strong language about the Serbs.

[46] Many western governments, human rights groups and international organisations insisted that the Račak operation was a deliberate massacre, conducted in defiance of earlier Serbian agreements to end the violence in Kosovo.

The Contact Group also condemns the decisions by the FRY authorities to refuse entry into Kosovo by ICTY Chief Prosecutor Judge Arbour."

[48] According to Edward S. Herman, media collaboration assisted the Račak massacre in serving as a casus belli for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Ranta's news conference on 17 March 1999 during the final days of the Rambouillet Agreement talks, coupled with media outlets failing to mention the circumstances of the Serbian offensive in the area, helped to justify NATO involvement in Kosovo.

[citation needed] The ICTY issued a sealed indictment on 27 May 1999 for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war against a number of senior Yugoslav officials.

[50] The Račak massacre was added by the ICTY prosecutors in an amended indictment,[51] but was subsequently dropped from the case, to "improve the expeditiousness of the proceedings while ensuring that they remain fair".

The president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, said that peace in the Balkans would only be established when Serbia expressed shame, and not pride, when discussing war crimes.