AN aid worker has told how starving Kosovar refugees are living in fear after troops shelled an Albanian border village.

Kate Ogden, 37, of Castle Road, Colne, said she believed Serb troops had shelled the village from across the border, killing two people and injuring others on Sunday night.

Many refugees had been staying near the village but it is not clear exactly what happened or why the village had been shelled.

Kate said the refugee camps were just a crazy mess when she arrived at the Albanian border a week ago.

She said: "All the aid workers were running around working on their own. No-one knew when aid was arriving. It was just a big mess."

Kate, a nutritionist for Action for Hunger, intended to distribute baby milk and porridge for the under-fives but none of her supplies arrived for five days.

She said: "The airport was completely disorganised. It just wasn't built to cope with that amount of traffic. They didn't even have a fork lift truck to unload the aeroplanes. Now we are getting regular helicopter loads of food, blankets, baby milk and so on." The border town of Kukech is normally home to only 20,000 people, but more than 30,000 refugees are now camped around it, overloading the sanitation systems.

Many of the refugees arrived with tractors and trailers, which are now their homes.

Kate and her seven co-workers have taken responsibility for distributing aid in one tractor park and are sharing supplies with other charities.

She said: "Most of them were told by Serb soldiers to leave their villages within an hour and just grabbed what they could. The main need was blankets because many of them are staying outside."

Kate said most of the refugees were in shock, despondent and desperate to go home.

She said: "A lot of them have lost members of their family, some have family still in Kosovo. They's always a huge queue outside the telephone office of people trying to track relations down."

The border is now closed but Kate believes it may be reopened to allow more refugees to cross into Albania.

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