The couple whose daughter was murdered by a Nato 'protector'

VITINA - On A cold and sunny morning last January, an 11-year-old girl called Merita Shabiu was playing in the snow outside her family home in the Kosovan town of Vitina when a smiling man in uniform offered her some chocolates.

Having gained her trust, the man led her by the hand to the block of flats standing opposite. There, in a dank basement, he sodomised her before crushing her neck on the concrete floor with his steel-capped boot.

It was a savage death, but Kosovo has in recent years been a savage country. What made the murder of Merita different was that it took place after Nato's "liberation" of the former Yugoslav province, rather than during the murderous chaos that preceded it.

And Merita's killer was not Serb or Albanian, but a Nato "peacekeeper": Frank J. Ronghi, a staff sergeant with the elite 82nd Airborne Division of the United States Army.

It did not take long for Ronghi to be arrested. Other children had seen Merita entering the building with the soldier that day and noted that she did not return.

Astonishingly, Ronghi had been boasting to fellow soldiers of his fetish for young girls and had described how he had raped three, including two young sisters, while on another mission in Haiti.

In Kosovo, he related with relish, there were endless opportunities, not just for rapes but murders too.

Ronghi, squad leader of the Alpha company of the 3rd battalion, even took his men to a wooded spot ideal, he said, for hiding a body. It was here that Merita's body was found a month later, stuffed in a plastic bag.

When Ronghi was arrested, he told the investigators how, after sexually assaulting Merita, he held her in a headlock and then dropped her body to the floor.

"She was still making a gurgling noise," he recalled, "so I put my left foot on the back of her neck, pushed down with all my weight, and stood there."

Charged with rape and premeditated murder, he was convicted in August at a court martial in Germany and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The incident, not surprisingly, made headline news in America, and the 1000-page report into the killing, published in September, added up to one of the most scathing indictments of the behaviour of US soldiers since Vietnam.

But 10 months after Merita's death, her family seem quietly to have been forgotten. What is their story? I travelled to Kosovo to find out.

The Shabius have left their cottage in Vitina, and now live in an isolated hamlet in the mountains, accessible only by trekking through wooded hills.

What food they get comes from aid agencies, and the jobs promised to the sons of the family by the Americans have not materialised.

Despite the circumstances of their daughter's death, no officials have come to see them in months.

Despite everything, Merita's father, Hamdi, who is 41, and her 37-year-old mother, Remzije, are courteous and hospitable, making tea and, ignoring the shortages, offering to share their meals.

The family tell me how the Serbs forced them out of their home during the Nato bombing in May last year.

All of them, including Merita, were forced to make their way through ice and forest to find refuge in neighbouring Macedonia. Hamdi is still partially handicapped by a beating from Serb soldiers.

"Looking back, it is strange that having survived the enemy, my daughter got killed by someone who was supposed to be a friend, who was supposed to protect us," Hamdi reflects. "But maybe that is fate, maybe that is what God has willed."

How does he feel now about the Americans?

"We do not hate them," he replies philosophically. "How can you hate a people for the act of one person. He was a bad man, he did very bad things to our daughter. He took her soul.

"Afterwards, we had a lot of American Army people coming to see us. They gave money to us and to others in the area. We used that to pay for the funeral.

"Hundreds of people came to the funeral, including people from the American Army. We were happy to see them there."

Hamdi has not seen the report published ordered by the US Army's chief of staff, General Eric Shineski, into the activities of Ronghi's unit in Kosovo.

If he had, he would have learned that the unit, the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, prided itself on its motto, "Shoot 'em in the face," and that none was prouder of the men's toughness than its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Ellerbe.

The role of the US forces at that time was clear - to keep the peace between the Albanian population and what was left of Kosovo's Serbs and to assist the civil powers.

Instead, the report concluded, the soldiers had been running riot, violating even "basic standards of conduct of human decency" and resorting to "intimidation, abuse and beating of Albanians."

The US troops underwent intense training for fighting in Kosovo. But instead, they faced the monotony of endless patrols and checkpoints.

Any time off was spent at the barracks at Camp Bondsteel, a little slice of the Midwest with its own McDonalds and Burger Kings, bowling alleys and cinemas - uncontaminated by locals or local products.

There, the bored young soldiers, many from inner-city ghettos, would kick their heels and swap war stories. The talk soon turned to their contempt for local "gooks" and "shqiptare" - a pejorative Serbo-Croat term for Albanians - and to what a hellhole Kosovo was.

But even in this testosterone-fuelled company, Ronghi's tales were memorably dark. One of his fantasies, it was reported, was to find a little girl with a single mother so he could rape and kill both, leaving no witnesses.

It was in this poisonous atmosphere that Ellerbe instructed his unit to "identify and neutralise" splinter Albanian groups

It was an order that was to prove fatal, and which the report found was responsible for "creating the condition to step over the line into criminal misconduct."

The scale of the abuse in the town and its environs depended on the whim of the US soldiers.

At night, the report revealed, they would shine torches into the face of civilians - after fixing the torches to their M4 carbines, so terrified victims would be looking down the barrel of a gun. Scaring locals was fun.

Soldiers admitted that they routinely beat civilians during interrogation. They also abused women, touching their private parts during searches. Sometimes the sexual assaults went further.

The report concluded that the battalion and company commanders knew, or should have known, what was going on, and recommended that Ellerbe and a number of more junior officers face disciplinary action.

In its immediate aftermath came vociferous, shocked condemnation of the soldiers' behaviour from American public figures, including Defence Secretary William Cohen, and much heart-searching about what had gone wrong in Vetina.

The Shabiu family were offered sympathy, jobs and money by a procession of senior US officials.

And now, in a final twist, it is reported that in spite of everything Ellerbe was recently selected for an assignment with the Army War College, putting him on a fast-track for promotion to General.

The Shabius had not heard the news about Ellerbe's career progress. "I am shocked, how can they do that?" Hamdi asked, before reflecting on what is probably the reality: "But there is nothing we can do, we are not important people."

- INDEPENDENT