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WASHINGTON, Sept 16 (Reuters) - FBI forensic specialists said on Thursday they were ready to buttress the stories of massacres told by local people to the International Criminal Tribunal after examining the bodies of 124 victims in Kosovo.
The findings of the FBI experts were due to be combined with the work of teams from more than 10 other countries to help prosecutors in The Hague make their cases concerning alleged war crimes committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in the former Yugoslavia.
In all, the FBI teams worked at 21 sites to uncover the 124 bodies, with the help of a sketch artist, an anthropologist and a pathologist, officials said.
``This evidence will help support witness statements,'' Arthur Eberhart, section chief of the investigative response unit at the FBI Academy, said at a news conference.
The FBI teams examined the bodies to determine the cause of death and recorded their findings with sketches, videotape, still cameras, charts, and satellite readings to identify the exact location of the sites.
One grim find was made outside the town of Gornje Obrinje, roughly 19 miles (30 km) northwest of provincial capital Pristina, where the bodies of 23 members of the same extended family who had been killed in April were uncovered.
``They were aged 2 years to 94 years old,'' Eberhart said.
He said 12 of the 23 family members were women, including five girls under 17.
Clothing and effects were used to identify the victims, officials said. For example, a red snowsuit containing unidentifiable remains was all that was left of a 4-year-old boy, they said.
William Rodriguez III, chief deputy medical examiner for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, said that the 4-year-old had been shot.
Rodriguez said a 2-year-old boy in the group had been killed by a ``blunt-force trauma,'' which occurred when the boy was hit in the head with the butt of a rifle.
Rodriguez said his examinations showed that others at sites around the country had been shot or, in some cases, had their throats slit ``so that they were nearly decapitated.''
The experts said that family members stood by and watched as they worked -- which made their task different from performing similar work in the United States. They also said they identified some of the remains by examining clothing and physical effects.
``They wore five to eight layers'' of clothing, Rodriguez said.
He said the people of Kosovo needed the clothing to keep from freezing because they feared that fires that could have kept them warm would give away their positions in the woods.
Eberhart said that one 6-year-old boy had pretended to be dead and survived the massacre of the 23 other members of his family while being buried under their bodies.
``Of course it's emotional,'' Eberhart said, adding that when he left, ``the 6-year-old just looked into my eyes.''