It was created in 1966 and occupies a natural bend of the river, which encircles the Tara mountain, between towns of Višegrad in Bosnia and Bajina Bašta in Serbia.

Excess electrical power produced during the rain season was used to pump water from the lake to hilltop of the Tara mountain, some 600 metres above.

To hold this water and serve as the reversible reservoir for the PS HPP Bajina Bašta plant, an artificial Zaovine Lake was created up in the mountains by damming the Beli Rzav river.

[7] During the summer days, Lake Perućac is the place where many of the residents of the surrounding area and the town of Bajina Bašta come to sunbathe, swim and fish.

The sewage system wasn't built so the waste spills directly into the streams and the lake itself, while floating garbage covered areas around the barges.

The bodies were believed to be those of Kosovo Albanians killed by Serbian forces during the 1999 conflict, brought to the lake in a refrigerated lorry dumped there during NATO air raids.

[16] Of 48 bodies examined by the Institute of Pathology and Forensic Medicine of Belgrade Military Hospital, 38 were male, one was female, and the sex of nine could not be established.

[18] Dragan Karleuša, head of the Serbian police organized crime unit responsible for investigating the grave, said that in April 1999 a freezer truck containing between 50 and 60 corpses was pushed into the lake.

[19][20] An anonymous reservist told Danas, a Belgrade daily newspaper, that he saw a freezer truck being pushed into the lake, after the water level had been lowered.

[20] The reservist was upset that local people were supposed to allow their children to swim in the lake while officials remained silent about the bodies concealed there.

[21] During the trial of police general Vlastimir Đorđević, chief of the Public Security Department in the Serbian MUP, before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in Hague, Đorđe Kerić, former chief of the Užice SUP, gave evidence that in April 1999 he had informed Đorđević that a refrigerator truck containing dozens of bodies of Kosovo Albanians had been found in Lake Perućac after some of the bodies surfaced.

Kerić had been told by the chief of the SUP Criminal Investigations Division that the bodies were those of civilians, men and women, from a sunken truck with no license plates.

He claimed Đorđević had ordered him to bury the bodies near the lake without notifying local legal officials or carrying out the standard scene of crime investigation procedure.

[22] Police sources alleged that Đorđević had been in charge of removing the bodies from Kosovo and burying them at secret locations in Serbia as part of a "cleaning-up operation" in Kosovo ordered by Slobodan Milošević in March 1999 at a meeting with Interior Minister, Vlajko Stojiljković, secret police chief Radomir Marković, and Đorđević.