"You can smell the burnt smell of the dead bodies," Ghosheh said. "You could also see body parts in and around the village."

Ghosheh said she saw two homes damaged by shells and bullets. She spoke of burned bodies found in a house, but did not elaborate and was not clear whether the U.N. team saw them.

She told the BBC: "We can say that there was definitely a horrific crime that was committed. The scale is still not clear to me."

A BBC correspondent traveling with the U.N. observers described the hamlet as an "appalling scene" of burned-out houses and gore.

"There are pieces of human flesh lying around the room, there is a big pile of congealed blood in the corner, there's a tablecloth that still has the pieces of someone's brain attached to the side of it," said the correspondent, Paul Danahar.

"They killed the people, they killed the livestock, they left nothing in the village alive," he added.