Serb residents survey ruins in Surdlica on Wednesday. (AP)

By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 29, 1999; Page A26

SURDLICA, Yugoslavia, April 28 – Everyone on the block said that Alexander Milic's basement was the best-built in town. He had reinforced its ceiling with iron rails, and the cement was poured about a yard thick.

Then a laser-guided bomb dropped by a NATO jet on Tuesday hit his three-story house, and the structure that seemed so sound was reduced to a heap of concrete and brick. People from the neighborhood who had sheltered themselves inside during the NATO air raid – including Milic and his family – perished.

The house in a heavily built-up residential neighborhood caved in on itself. Beneath the rubble, townspeople say, were the crushed and dismembered bodies of 16 victims, 11 of them children. Among the dead were Milic, his wife, Vesna, their two children – Vladimir, 11, and Miljana, 16 – and the children's grandmother.

Facades of nearby houses were shorn away, and the red tiles typical of Serbian country rooftops were torn off dozens. A neighboring house also was flattened, but two residents survived. At the street corner, beyond a crumpled white sedan, lay a tan, twisted metal fin, apparently from a NATO bomb.

Next to the fin, on a broken concrete beam, sat the Milic children's grandfather, who had gone out for groceries when the blast hit. He wept silently, his face in his right hand.

"You can walk around all day and not find a military facility" nearby, said Nebojsa Vujovic, the Foreign Ministry spokesman.

Residents, however, said that a low white building on a hilltop about 500 yards away once housed army vehicles. The complex, which had been damaged by several bombs that pierced its roof, is part of a water supply system.

In Brussels, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said the attack had destroyed an army training center, but that during the strike, "a precision-guided weapon failed to guide accurately to its designated target and impacted some 200 to 300 meters beyond the barracks in a small residential area."

He added, "NATO has never, and will never, target civilians."

The nature of NATO's intended target was of little importance to citizens solemnly gazing at the destruction.

"There was a huge blast and a big cloud of yellow smoke and chaos when the bomb hit," said Zoran Savic, a young telecommunications worker. "How can this be collateral damage when it was such a direct hit? The whole town knew that this was a place where people took shelter. This was the biggest house in the neighborhood, so we are suspicious."

Dusan Petrovic, an elementary school English teacher, said he worked with Alexander Milic for several years at an electric-motor factory, before Milic left to open a pair of small grocery stores. "He boasted about how strong the house was," Petrovic said.

Reporters were bused to a second site that Yugoslav authorities said was hit Tuesday. A crater, 20 feet deep and 30 feet wide, was carved among several houses. "I only escaped because I went across the street to hide in my friends' cellar," said Natasha Nemad, an elderly janitor.

Neighbors said that a white sheet-metal warehouse a few hundred yards from the crater was a military storage depot. It had been hit by bombs on at least two occasions – on Tuesday and April 6 – and turned into a twisted formless sculpture.

"Sometimes, the bombs missed," said Radica Ristic, who lived in a nearby house. "One landed in the river, another hit a tree, which we chopped up.

"We can't eat. We can't sleep," Ristic went on. "Sometimes I say to myself, we should just leave, become refugees and get it over with."