The 24 bodies lay in rows, their blood mixing with the grit of the farmyard, the site of the latest mass slaying in Kosovo.
Serb forces attacked the farm, in the village of Rogovo, in the morning, hours before diplomats from the international Contact Group sat down in Brussels to demand a ceasefire between Serbia and its ethnic Albanian foes.
The Serbs say this was a counter-attack on a guerrilla base after a group of rebels in a van ambushed and killed a police patrolman nearby. They said they chased the van back to the farm, which they captured during an assault in which there were no survivors.
A total of 15 women and children in a neighbouring house survived, cowering in upstairs rooms as the slaughter erupted around them.
"The guerrillas arrived here last night," Mrs Nasmine Berisa said. "In the morning my husband got up to drive his truck away. He drove out of the gate, and saw police, so he reversed back inside the compound and shouted that they were there."
She said a few moments later gunfire exploded around the farm as the Serb police attacked. "There was so much shooting, we didn't dare look out of the window," she said, sitting in the same house while monitors arranged the evacuation of her family.
"When they attacked, the children's grandmother went downstairs, the door opened and she shouted at the police `Kill me but leave the children.' A policeman hit her. He broke her arm. He pushed her back inside and closed the door. The shooting went on."
Soon afterwards, the monitors told Mrs Berisa that her husband was among the dead.
A senior operations officer with the Kosovo verifiers said an investigation into the killings had begun.
"Clearly there are questions to be answered," Gen John Drew ienkewicz said. He said the Serb investigating judge appeared to take too little time - two hours - to examine the bodies and there was mystery surrounding the death of the final four men, who were killed three hours after the first killings, at 10 a.m.
The general continued: "Finally, what were the MUP [Serbian police] doing in an Albanian village at six in the morning?"
Last night at 8 p.m., a hand grenade, apparently thrown in retaliation, exploded in a bar in the centre of the capital, Pristina, wounding three Serbs.
As the Contact Group was proclaiming the success of its new "take-it-or-leave-it" demand for both sides to go to a Paris peace conference, international monitors were walking along the rows of the dead.
"It's a bloodbath," said one British observer with the Kosovo Verification Mission at the scene.
Five of the dead were in Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) uniforms. The rest, all young men, were in civilian clothes. Eleven had been shot in the head or face.
Some bullets had smashed through the grey breeze blocks of the lavatory, killing the man inside. His body had been removed, but a large pool of blood remained.
One man, like most in civilian clothes, lay with his eyes open and his mouth in a grimace, a neat bullet hole through his forehead. Several machine-guns lay around the scene. The faces of others were simply unrecognisable.
These dead were certainly guerrillas, and the farm was almost certainly a base. On Thursday a battle in nearby hills had left three KLA dead. The area is a major supply route for rebel units bringing in men and supplies from neighbouring Albania.
If the international community was looking for a sign of good faith from Belgrade, it failed to get it.
Instead, diplomats were left looking wrong-footed as they issued their pre-planned statements expressing optimism following the Brussels meeting.
And the pressure is now on NATO, which meets today, to come up with some way to stem the fighting which is already threatening to derail the Kosovo peace conference, scheduled for Paris in only a week's time.