The report from the Finnish team, however, was kept confidential by the EU until long after the war, and the team leader, Helena Ranta, issued a press release at the time containing her "personal opinion" and indicating differing and opposite findings. Ranta stated that "...medicolegal investigations such as scientific analysis of bodies cannot give a conclusive answer to the question whether there was in fact a battle between the police and insurgents...
"but she leaned towards the victims being non-combatants in part because "...no ammunition was found in the pockets" of the bodies she investigated. The report was widely understood as saying that the Finnish team had disproved the finding released by the Serb and Belarusian pathologists, whose tests had shown a positive for gunshot residue on the hands of 37 out of the 40 bodies, indicating that they had fired arms.
Criticism was levelled against the paraffin method used by the Serbs and Belarusians to test for powder residue on the victims' hands, since it regularly gives false positives because of many other substances, including fertilizers, tobacco, urine and cosmetics, and even provides false negatives on occasion. The test is still used by the police of many countries who cannot afford more modern methods, but has been described since as early as 1967 as 'of no use scientifically.'
The international reaction to the Serb 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) differed considerably, not least in the NATO-countries who were preparing to intervene to stop widespread human rights violations in Kosovo. The former was ignored or dismissed as propaganda, and the latter was accepted as truth; evidence of a massacre against civilians. Several pro-war activists and writers wrote of, and quoted, the Finnish team's press-release as if it were the actual report. Both reports were used as evidence by the prosecution and particularly by the defence of the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević in his trial at The Hague,
until the Račak case was dropped out of the indictment because of lack of evidence.
The full report of the EU team was handed over to the ICTY at the end of June 2000. An executive summary was published in 2001, but the full report has never been released.
In October 2008,
Helena Ranta, the Finnish pathologist who had conducted the forensic examination on the Račak casualties, stated that she had been pressured 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 more explicit the role of Serb troops in the incident. She refused to do so.
And i would like to remind all of you that all NATO war and news machinery was against Serbia during the 90's, so don't believe in everything you have read about us, because most of it are lies. I am not claiming that we didn't commit crimes during those wars, but we were not worse than any of the other participants in them.
