Want peace? Invaders leave Ukraine

Her face burnt almost beyond recognition, she lies prone on her hospital bed and tells in a child's whispers of the day her mother, father, her two brothers, her sister and her cousin - among 363 people from the same village - were wiped out.

At eight years old, Taisa Abakarova is an eyewitness to the worst war crime in the savage campaign of Russia's acting President, Vladimir Putin, against the 'terrorist fighters' of Chechnya.

The village of Katyr Yurt, 'safe' in the Russian-occupied zone, far from the war's front line, and jam-packed with refugees, was untouched on the morning of 4 February when Russian aircraft, helicopters, fuel-air bombs and Grad missiles pulverised the village. They paused in the bombing at 3pm, shipped buses in, and allowed a white-flag convoy to leave - and then they bombed that as well, killing Taisa's family and many others.

The Observer , in a joint investigation with Channel 4's Dispatches , went to Katyr Yurt and saw what was left: a landscape as if from the Somme, streets smashed to matchwood, trees shredded, blood-stained cellars, the survivors in a frenzy of fear. The village was littered with the remains of Russian 'vacuum' bombs - fuel-air explosives that can suck your lungs inside out, their use against civilians banned by the Geneva Convention.

Local witnesses, astonished by the first visit by Western outsiders to their village, ringed west and east by special troops from the Russian secret police, the FSB, said they had counted 363 corpses piled two or three high in the street - 'so many you couldn't get a car past them' - before the Russians took many of the bodies away and dumped them in a mass grave.

Taisa has a cruelly burnt face, both hands burnt and bandaged, a broken right leg swathed in plaster, a left knee pinioned by iron bolts and internal bruising, and yet she wanted to tell us what happened. Taisa's father, Mansour, 45, a builder; her mother, Hava, 45, a school teacher; her brothers, Magomed, 14; Ruslan, 12; her cousin, Hava, eight; and her sister, Madina, six, were squashed into the family's black Volga saloon. She explained how the convoy left Katyr Yurt for what they hoped was safety. 'There was a white flag on our car, flying from a wooden stick,' she said. 'Then two planes came and they hit us and my dad and mum were sitting in front of us and my brother and me were sitting in the back seat. Then we were blown up. I fell to the mud in the ground.'

Taisa winced as her aunt, Tabarik Zaumajeva, swabbed the burnt skin around her eye. The aunt said: 'At night she is scared to close her eyes. She told me that she was afraid the whole picture would come back.'

The worst is that Taisa's aunt cannot bring herself to tell the little girl she is the only survivor of the seven people in the family car.