GRISLY DISCOVERIES; SERB ATROCITIES MAY HAVE CLAIMED 10,000.

Byline: Laura King Associated Press

Accounts of brutality in Kosovo emerged Thursday in different tones - the stunned, flat voice of a teen-age girl and the measured sentences of a British official - but they both told of irrational savagery mixed with careful planning.

Just six days into the international military presence in Kosovo, officials have discovered so many mass graves and killing sites and heard so many wrenching accounts of atrocities that they now estimate at least 10,000 people were killed in the Serb crackdown against Kosovo Albanians, which began shortly before NATO began its 78-day air bombardment March 24.

The mounting evidence is likely to add to calls for the arrest of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. But President Clinton said Thursday that peacekeepers will take a ``wait and see'' approach toward Milosevic's arrest.

Fears grew that the ethnic Albanian rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army will seek violent revenge against the province's Serbs as the Yugoslav army continues its withdrawal under the international peace deal's terms. The plan called for the KLA to demilitarize, but rebels were openly bringing weapons in over the border from Albania on Thursday.

One of the most grisly reports of slaughter so far came Thursday from the village of Poklek, 20 miles west of the provincial capital Pristina. The killings were, by residents' accounts, methodical.

Elhame Muqolli, 14, told of how she and scores of friends and neighbors were herded into a room by Serb police, who threw in a hand grenade, raked the room with machine guns and then set it on fire to kill anyone who might have survived.

Muqolli and five others had managed to jump out a window, but 62 others died in the April 17 incident. Their blood dripped through the floor to stain the ceiling of the room below.

There were no fresh bloodstains on the walls of a basement room at a police station in Pristina, but the items piled there spoke of horror: an array of torture instruments including bats, chains, a pickax and a black hood. An ethnic Albanian resident of the neighborhood said he and many others had been beaten there. British peacekeeping soldiers also found sadistic pornography in the room.

What was most chilling, said British Foreign Office Minister Geoff Hoon, was that the station ``seems to have been just an ordinary police headquarters. In other words, the barbaric acts carried out in this building were probably almost a matter of routine.''

Amid the accounts of brutality and fear, there were stories of courage and compassion. In the western town of Decane, residents recounted how the local Serbian Orthodox monastery sheltered ethnic Albanians from a rampage by withdrawing soldiers.

Now that the soldiers have left, a few elderly Serbs fearful of Albanian reprisals hid in the monastery, but local ethnic Albanians who remember the monastery's kindness vowed to protect them.

But in Devic, a monastery tucked away in the hills of central Kosovo was ransacked and terrorized by KLA rebels who had surrounded the religious shrine since early 1998, the CNN television network reported.

Serb civilians frantically followed Serb soldiers retreating from the province, and tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians streamed back into their homeland from camps in Albania and Macedonia.

At least 10,000 ethnic Albanians - and probably many more - were killed by Serbs in a two-month slaughter across Kosovo while NATO bombs fell on Yugoslavia, according to Hoon, the British foreign office minister.

``Tragically, our estimates of the numbers of innocent men, women and children killed will almost certainly have to be revised upwards,'' he said.

NATO launched the bombing campaign after Milosevic's government refused to end Yugoslavia's crackdown on Kosovo's Albanians. Although the campaign eventually succeeded in forcing Milosevic to accept a peace plan, the peacekeeping force authorized by the plan is still troubled by the question of what Russia's role should be.

U.S. and Russian officials negotiated on the issue for a second straight day in Helsinki, Finland. A U.S. official said late Thursday the talks were still snagged on American objections to giving Moscow control over any part of the province.

The two sides did, however, reach an accord on how Russians will work under NATO command and on arrangements for sharing peacekeeping duties at the Pristina airport, where about 200 Russian troops have been holed up since their surprise arrival Saturday ahead of NATO peacekeepers, the official said.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said in the Finnish capital that the peacekeeping operation in Kosovo would not be disrupted if the talks break down.

``This is a mission we can carry out without Russian participation, but we would prefer to have Russian participation,'' Bacon told reporters during a break in the talks.

Clinton predicted a ``successful conclusion'' to the talks, but Russian President Boris Yeltsin insisted again that Moscow will continue to demand a separate sector for its Kosovo peacekeepers. Talks were to resume Friday.

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Photo: (color) An unidentified ethnic Albanian covers his mouth and nose as he looks at a room full of decomposed bodies in a Kosovo village.

Santiago Lyon/Associated Press