The United States Army Infantry School wrote that "the Ministry of Emergency Situations workers, who were tasked with removing civilian corpses and taking them to the nearby village of Goyskoye for identification (..) collected bodies lying by the river, some of which had ears, noses, or fingers sliced off.
An amateur video dated 21 March 2000, was uncovered and released in 2004 by Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta.