Rape house is only one of the horrors on stretch of road where hundreds died

The room at the top of the house where the rapes took place is easy to find

The room at the top of the house where the rapes took place is easy to find. Inside, sprayed in Serbian on a wall in giant green fluorescent letters is: "I fucked Leonora". I leave the last name blank, though it was included.

Leonora was presumably one of many led into this room, with its fold-away bed and torn brown sofa, in a house captured from its Albanian occupants, looted, and used as a checkpoint by Serb police.

Throughout April, at the height of the ethnic cleansing, the police stationed at this house, in the village of Grashtica, took their pick of the thousands of ethnic Albanian females who were forced to pass through on their journey out of Kosovo. Now, with the sudden withdrawal of Serb forces, this valley, like many others in Kosovo, is offering up its secrets.

The Serbs set fire to the second floor of the house, which is black and sooty, but the rest of the house is intact, the evidence hard to miss. A second piece of graffiti simply says, again in Serbian, "Get fucked by Allah".

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Green plastic pineapple-sized grenade boxes lie in the garden, along with the TV thrown from the window. Outside in the road are six rotting cows and, a burned-out bus, the molten metal having dribbled into the road and solidified. Nearby a single white plastic chair on which the duty sentry would sit.

"They would rape them first, then they would take their money," said 22-year-old Abidin Krasniqi. "They used to send them out of the house without clothes to go down the road to Pristina."

Like many of the locals, he had time to flee his home and hide in the hills on either side of this winding forested valley.

Clothes from the family are strewn around the remaining rooms, including several pairs of children's boots, as well as medicines, the control of a computer game, and an English exercise book, written in a careful hand by Quendresa, one of the daughters of the house.

One essay is entitled The Fire. It reads: "I saw some smoke and I said John the hotel must be on fire." Krasniqi knew of the family, knew of Quendresa, but has no idea if she survived.

The rape house is only one of the horrors along this 20 kilometre stretch of road which winds up from the north-eastern suburbs of Pristina into the hills. Hundreds of ethnic Albanians died in this exodus, and their bodies lie in several mass graves scattered along the roadside.

The next village along is called Makovc and looks very similar to any pretty countryside village, except that here, at farm number 53, is a garage and inside the garage is the stink of congealing human blood.

By the door of the garage the bright sunshine picks out bright brass cartridge casings from a Kalasnikov machine-gun. The plaster wall at the opposite end is studded with bullet holes.

And in the middle, amid a jumble of broken wooden planks, is the blood. It is black and dry and smells appalling. Lift one of the planks up and underneath the blood is still sticky, the smell released much stronger.

A blue human anorak with two holes and blood stains around the collar. And amid the blood, two more bullet holes straight into the wood, apparently caused by the delivery of the coup de grace.

Serb police units were based in these houses, explains our guide, and this was their execution chamber. There is a second, across the street, but the locals are sure it is mined and dare not approach.

No one knows how many were killed here. No one who was around at the time survived.

The bodies of two old men incinerated along with their house are buried in a nearby wood. "It did not take long to bury them, there wasn't much to bury," said a neighbour, a farmer newly returned from the hills.

In a graveyard on the other side of the road, a little way further, is freshly dug earth where dogs have already dug out the tops of the canvas bags in which lie several dead bodies. None of the locals want to find out how many.

Stepping out of the dark and smell of the garage, I see a well-kept white horse followed by two brown ones trotting past, the farmer having saved them by keeping them in the forests.

Two things happened here in this pretty valley. First, the Serbs, wanting to keep the main road to Belgrade clear, but still keen not to slacken on their deportations, pushed the population of towns in the north-east to Pristina through this roundabout route.

Then, later that month, Serb forces launched a three-pronged attack on Kolic, a village at the head of the valley. The attack hit the hilltop villages first, their people scattering in panic in cars, tractors or by foot down to Kolic, where thousands more were already living in the woods, their villages destroyed.

Their tractors and cars, many burned, all looted, with discarded clothes, cooking pots and rain-damaged family photographs scattered around, litter the road for mile after mile.

A truck lies on its side in the trees, a camp site sits as it was when it was abandoned, blankets on the ground, jeans and plastic bags lying about, and a carved wooden baby's crib, presumably too heavy to carry.

By the smashed village mosque the valley opens out. Dozens of abandoned tractors and cars sit scattered. "There were 40,000 people here," said an officer of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Mensur Hoti, aged 24. "Every time we fired at them, they would open fire on the people. There are 34 killed here, we buried them by the mosque."

NATO is here too. Hoti is abruptly summoned away for a conference under some nearby trees, not by one of his men, but by a British soldier, in British uniform and belt webbing, but without a cap. He shouts in English "Come here!" hiding his face from us. The KLA soldier returned to order us away.

What this lone Briton is doing, outside the NATO operating zone, is unclear, though presumably this is living proof that the SAS were indeed working in Kosovo with the KLA during the air strikes.

Further back down the road huge holes have been gouged by a stick of NATO bombs, then we follow two boys up a dirt road. Sticking out of the road is the tail of a long white unexploded missile. A second identical missile, fully exposed and already covered in red Albanian graffiti, is lying by a large field of bright red and mauve spring flowers.

They look like anti-radar missiles, and the boys recount excitedly how NATO tried several times to hit a radar site on a hill above, finally succeeding on the second day. I take a fin as a souvenir.

On the way back, we pass a few tractor-trailers carrying farmers and their families home, the trickle that is to become a flood of returnees.

Finally, our guide takes us into a nearby wood, to a spring he says generations have sipped from. A steel cup balanced on a gnarled tree root seems the only thing of value missed by the looters, and Krasniqi points up the hill.

"There is the house of a Serb. He is a neighbour of ours, but he told the troops where to come and get us." Now the Serb has fled his house. "The KLA is looking for him," says Krasniqi.