The victims were discovered in the years after the war in eight mass graves dug around the village. The largest one contained 58 bodies.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY’s verdict in the case against five high-ranking Yugoslav and Serbian state, army and police officials said that on or around March 25, 1999, forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia attacked the two villages of Mala Krusa/Krushe e Vogel and Velika Krusa/Krushe e Madhe, which are around one kilometre apart. According to the verdict, residents of Mala Krusa/Krushe e Vogel took refuge in a forested area outside the village where they were able to observe Yugoslav and Serbian forces systematically looting and burning their houses.

The ICTY heard a number of witnesses testifying of killings, beheadings, rape and torture in the village. Serbian forces also blew up the village mosque.

According to the testimonies, as well as reports from international NGOs, Serbian police tried to conceal the killings by burning bodies or removing them using trucks and other vehicles. Villagers saw police dumping dead bodies into the nearby river. According to the OSCE, when Serbia’s forces withdrew from Kosovo in June, NATO troops removed a truck from the river and bones were found in the back. Some bodies were also found in the river.

According to Robert McNeil, a British forensic expert who took part in the exhumations in the village in 1999, he and his team saw that the faces of the victims had been covered with torn pieces of clothing and their bodies had been severely mutilated.

“Their noses and ears were missing, and there were signs of serious trauma around their almost empty eye sockets. All that was left in the eye sockets was blackened, congealed blood where their eyes had once been,” McNeil told BIRN in an interview in 2023.

There were children among the bodies, which were still relatively undecayed, according to McNeil. “Each face was almost covered in a mask of dried blood. It was clear they had been beaten and shot multiple times,” he said.

Some 60 people from the village are still listed as missing.