Dying for gold: Who killed the miners of Buffelsfontein?

The miners had known hunger before, but never like this. Afterwards they would talk of cracked skin, sores that would not heal, an emptiness that stopped you from sleeping or ever being fully awake. George and Alfred called it “the grief of hunger”, a numbness that engulfed you from within. Once they didn’t eat for 18 days. Although what was a “day” anyway, when they had not seen sunlight for months?

Their job was to sit in one of the middle tiers of the 37-level Buffelsfontein gold mine, about a kilometre underground, collecting the food that was lowered through the concrete shaft on a rope, then sending it on to the levels below. In the good times, the miners could get almost anything they desired, albeit at inflated prices: maize porridge, pilchards, biltong, milk, biscuits, mayonnaise, Coca-Cola, beer, whisky, cigarettes, even buckets of chicken from the local KFC.

As well as food, the rope carried humans in and out. The elevator cage had stopped working when Buffels, as everyone called it, had closed down in 2013. So had the ventilation fans and cooling system. At the mine’s deepest point, 3km underground, the natural temperature of the rock was 58.6°C. Not for nothing were the men who dug illegally in the labyrinth of abandoned tunnels known as “zama-zamas”, the ones who “try their luck”.

Much of what the zama-zamas mined was sold to licensed dealers, pawnbrokers or even to small mining companies. Its illicit origins erased, the gold percolated into global markets, eventually making its way into wedding rings and bullion vaults. The higher the gold price soared, the deeper the miners went. In 2015 a troy ounce of gold had cost just over $1,000. In late 2024 it was nearing $3,000 for the first time in history.

But the world of commerce meant little to the men who were trapped underground, slowly starving to death. One day in August 2024, George and Alfred (not their real names) waited for the rope to descend, but it never did. It didn’t come the next day, either. At first the zama-zamas weren’t especially concerned – the food deliveries had paused before. But this time the days turned into weeks, then months. Even with strict rationing, their reserves were getting alarmingly low.

“Being in jail is much better than being in this jail of the mine.”

With no mobile-phone signal, the men were cut off from the outside world. In November a fellow zama-zama entered the mine on a rope and told them that the South African police were camped at the top of the shaft and had taken control of what went in and who came out. By cutting off supplies, the police hoped to force the miners to the surface. But they had also blocked access to the clandestine rope crews that the men relied on to pull them out.

The police said the miners could walk underground to another shaft, where it was possible to leave, and that they were refusing to come out because they feared arrest. The miners said the other shaft was unreachable – a claim supported by the mine’s owners – and that they were desperate to reach the surface. “Everyone wanted to come out,” Alfred said later. “They were like, ‘Being in jail is much better than being in this jail of the mine.’”

Later in November the police finally let residents from a nearby township send a rope down. It took 20 men about 40 minutes to haul up one miner; in the summer heat they could retrieve just a few a day. They also lowered modest amounts of porridge and mageu, a drink made from maize.

But the supplies were too sparse, the rescue too slow. Underground the men fought each other for food, tumbling to the floor, scooping up anything that spilled. They were dying: some from hunger, some from sickness, some from falling after trying to climb to safety. George and Alfred said that a number of the miners started eating the dead, trading three grams of gold for a piece of flesh. One miner, who had already taken his ration of porridge, begged his bosses for another cup, but they refused. Half an hour later, he was dead.

Most of the miners were migrants from Mozambique, Lesotho or Zimbabwe, but George and Alfred were South Africans. All along they had consoled themselves that their government would never kill them. Now they were not so sure. Peering down the endless concrete shaft,
Alfred wondered why he should endure a prolonged death from starvation when he could simply jump.

Credit: Tommy Trenchard

When gold was discovered in 1886 on the Witwatersrand, a ridge of rocky hills on the high-veld above what is now Johannesburg, the biggest problem was finding people to dig it up. Working in a mine was poorly paid, physically gruelling and dangerous: miners faced a high risk of dying in an accident or from lung diseases such as pneumonia or silicosis. White politicians, under pressure from the mine-owners, decided that the solution to this labour shortage was to force black Africans off their farms and underground. The mining companies also recruited workers from neighbouring countries, housing them in prison-like compounds near the shafts. In Lesotho, a mountain kingdom from which huge numbers of men migrated to work in South Africa, singer-poets described the train to the mines as a millipede, carrying labourers across “the wilderness of the republic…where people live through unceasing work”.

In the compounds and townships of Johannesburg, the “city of gold”, a rough-and-ready culture took root. The migrants developed a genre of music that combined poetic lyrics with concertinas, accordions and homemade drums fashioned from car tyres and paraffin tins. Women danced alluringly as they played, and the music became known as “famo”, from the Sesotho phrase ho re famo, which means “to lift up the skirts”.

Gold-mining was deeply exploitative and highly productive: by some estimates, South Africa has contributed 40% of the gold ever mined. Buffels, which opened in 1953, was one of several mines clustered around the small city of Klerksdorp, a two-hour drive south-west from Johannesburg. In its six decades of operation it produced 2,200 tonnes of gold.

A corporate brochure for Buffels published in 1983 celebrates an operation that was both a feat of engineering and an entire social world. Each month the mine consumed 93m kilowatt hours of power, 600 tonnes of food and enough water to fill 4,000 swimming pools. Nearly 18,000 people were employed there. The black workers played in 40 different football teams. The white ones joined the golf club.

But the boom times couldn’t last. In 1985 South Africa’s gold mines employed more than 500,000 people. By 2022 that figure had fallen below 90,000. The decline had many causes, one of which was that the gold was getting harder to reach. When Buffels closed in 2013 its owners said it still had 54 tonnes of reserves – worth $5.8bn at today’s prices – but it was not profitable enough to extract them. The deposits were so far from the shafts that it took miners hours of their shift just to reach them.

This didn’t put off the zama-zamas, who were prepared to live underground for months at a time. They moved in as soon as the mining companies moved out. Security footage released in 2015 shows scores of men, some carrying machineguns, ransacking buildings at Buffels for scrap metal. At some point they took over the tunnels. It was not hard to do, if you had a very long rope and a head for heights. Some of the shafts had been capped with concrete slabs, which could be blasted away; others were still open to the sky.

Some of the men were familiar with the maze of tunnels because they and their forefathers had helped to dig them. “Nobody today knows the mine better than the miners who built it,” said a police officer who requested anonymity. “If we try to chase them underground they literally disappear.”

Statistics about informal mining are guesswork. In 2019 the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, an NGO, estimated that there were 30,000 illegal miners in South Africa extracting about $1bn’ worth of gold annually. Gwede Mantashe, the government minister responsible for mines, has said that illicit trade in precious metals was worth 60bn rand ($3.3bn) last year. Many zama-zamas are unlawful migrants, often working under violent gangs from nearby countries who control access to the shafts.

The gangs force miners to pay exorbitant prices for food, equipment and sometimes even entry to the mine. In some cases the gangs refuse to hoist a miner to the surface until he has found enough gold to pay off his debts. Three teenage zama-zamas told journalists last year that they were given false promises of work, then forced into Buffels at gunpoint. Other miners interviewed by police said that the going rate to be pulled out was 25 grams of gold, worth about 25,000 rand ($1,400) at black-market prices.

Khuma, a township near Buffels, was ruled by a faction of Terene (the Train), one of the most feared gangs in Lesotho. Terene, like the other gangs from Lesotho that control the mines, is ostensibly a syndicate of famo musicians. In the old days the famo singers serenaded the gangsters. But over the years, the gangsters and their troubadours became more closely entwined. “You can’t differentiate the famo gangs and the illegal miners. They are working together now,” explained Lesotho’s deputy police commissioner, Moqhebi Likhama. There’s a widespread assumption in Khuma that the gangs have bought off and intimidated police officers, security guards and magistrates.

Rival famo gangs insult each other in song and kill each other on the streets, pursuing vendettas and fighting over the mineshafts. The mob in Khuma was in a turf war with another in Kanana, a township about 20km away. Last year a group of men walked into a tavern there, asked for “the Basotho” (as people from Lesotho are known), and shot eight people dead. There are stories of grotesque violence: murders celebrated like a football triumph, corpses found with severed genitals, tunnels booby-trapped with explosives. “These are not Robin Hoods trying to help the community,” said a mining engineer from Klerksdorp who used to work on Buffels. “They are vicious fucking murderers.”

George and Alfred entered the mine on separate nights in July 2024, the hole merging with the winter sky. They told me little about how they were recruited. George mentioned a chance encounter on a football pitch with a man who offered to take him underground, “so you can put something on your table for your kids”.

The two old friends lived in Khuma and were in their 30s. They were both fathers, and mindful of their responsibilities. “As we all know in South Africa there are no jobs,” said George. He used to work at a slime dump, a site where waste from gold extraction is disposed of, but had been laid off. George wanted to buy satchels and school uniforms for his children. Alfred was already worrying about Christmas. They could make 9,000 rand ($500) a month working the ropes underground – three times as much as they would get frying fish in the local shopping mall. They wouldn’t have to do it for long. The entrance to the shaft was just across a river from their homes; the tunnels probably lay beneath their feet.

There were a dozen shafts in the area, many of them used by zama-zamas. Hundreds of kilometres of tunnels ran off from the shafts, like the roots from a tree trunk. George and Alfred would be working in shaft 10. They dropped into it on a rope, trying not to think about the 17 seconds they would fall if the rope snapped. Below them, at a depth of 1,500 metres, an old rail track led laterally to shaft 11, about 3km away. These two shafts, as far as they knew, were cut off from the rest.

From then on, the details of their story are hard to verify. Almost all the surviving miners were migrants who were kept in police custody. Only a few South Africans, such as George and Alfred, have been released on bail. The picture they paint of the conditions they endured is consistent with accounts from mines elsewhere. The men lived shirtless in the heat, their way lit by head lamps, their beds fashioned from discarded rope. One abandoned tunnel was designated as a toilet. Another was used to wash in. It was never hard to find water, which flowed everywhere, even when it was not raining above ground.

For the first few months, before the police came, George and Alfred worked the ropes for up to six hours a night. It was not arduous, they said. There was time to talk about music, family, the things they would do when they got out: get a driving licence, perhaps, or take their kids to McDonald’s. They did not dig, but others did, with hammers, chisels and explosives in the levels below. Those were dangerous places, where the rock could give way unpredictably and bury a man alive.

The miners were forbidden from fighting, stealing or even moving without a torch. Their bosses collected fines in gold, the currency of the underworld, measured out in bottle caps. Zama-zamas compared their lives to soldiers, moulded by discipline. “If we had to live by those rules here on the surface it would be a perfect world,” said a miner who had been down a different shaft. Another told me how an ill-fated experiment to bring sex workers into a mine was abandoned when men started fighting each other out of jealousy. This harsh regime could easily slide into abuse. Police would later accuse one of the underground gangsters, nicknamed “Tiger”, of assault, torture and murder, based on testimony from survivors.

Each shaft had a “shop”, run by the gang that controlled the mine, in which miners could buy food, alcohol and medicine. The shop at shaft 10 was a few hundred metres below where George and Alfred worked, in a cavernous space as big as a church. At these depths, a sixpack of Heineken went for the equivalent in gold of 800 rand ($40). The miners were partial to BronCleer, a cough syrup containing codeine. “You just black out and sleep like a baby,” said George.

Twice a month everyone would gather at the shop for a meeting, where they aired grievances and received instructions. It was also a social occasion, when the men would feast on fried chicken, hook up speakers to a generator, and dance to the beats of Makhadzi, a singer from Limpopo. There was a television, on which they watched pirated copies of “Outlaws”, a drama about two feuding families in the Lesotho borderlands. On those days, the mine almost felt like home.

Those who knew the old Buffels regarded zama-zamas like George and Alfred with a mixture of horror and awe. The mining engineer from Klerksdorp described the conditions as “Dante’s inferno, two kilometres underground”. When I called Bernard Swanepoel, a former boss of Village Main Reef, the company that owned the mine when it closed, he was astonished that anyone was there at all. “I’ve worked on mines all my life,” he said. “If you told me that you could swing someone down a kilometre on a rope I’d have told you exactly how mad you are.”

The sheer danger of mine shafts is one reason why the law mandates them to be “rehabilitated” after they close. The headframe at the top should be demolished, the metal sold for scrap, the rubble pushed down the hole. Finally a concrete plug should be set into the top of the shaft, ideally to a depth of ten metres or more. That is enough, in theory, to stop anyone from getting back in.

That work was never completed at Buffels. The mine changed hands four times after 1997, bundled together with other assets, until it was acquired in 2015 by a Chinese-backed firm, Heaven-Sent Gold. The new buyers were interested in another mine that came as part of the package, which was still operational, but grudgingly took on the defunct shafts as well. They later blamed the delay in rehabilitation on rising costs, illegal mining and the “inconsistent flow of funds” from the government, which they said had not released 48m rand ($2.7m) from a fund set aside for the purpose.

This story was not unusual: mines had been closed in lackadaisical fashion all over South Africa. Roads in Johannesburg were sinking into the ground, as the city of gold was literally undermined by zama-zamas in tunnels below.

South Africa’s government worried that its authority was being undermined too. Cyril Ramaphosa, the president, who first rose to prominence as the leader of a mining union, wrote last November that illicit mining cost the economy billions of rands in “export income, royalties and taxes”. That might have been true where zama-zamas were stealing gold from operational mines, bribing or tunnelling their way in, but was less so at Buffels, where no company was interested in digging. The president also condemned the criminality associated with illicit mining. He alluded to a notorious incident at a mine dump in Krugersdorp, where eight women were gang-raped after going to shoot a music video; furious locals had stoned and beaten the zama-zamas they deemed responsible.

In December 2023 the government launched a nationwide crackdown, calling it Vala Umgodi, or “Close the Hole”. The idea was to force the miners to surface by cutting off their supplies – to “smoke them out”, as one minister put it. The police considered this the only way to clear the tunnels without engaging armed miners in dangerous battles underground.

When I arrived at Buffels in early December the operation had settled into a sullen siege. Dozens of police officers sat beneath gazebos at the top of shaft 11. Occasionally, as if to break the monotony, they patrolled the area on horseback. The hole itself – technically a ventilation shaft – was an unfenced void, ringed by rubble. It was hard to get a sense of its scale, because sunbeams did not reach far down its sheer concrete walls. Peering over its lip induced none of the vertigo of a cliff edge, only the blackness of invisible depth, like the sea.

Beneath some trees, across a silent road, young men in bucket hats passed round a joint. One of them picked through nearby stones, wetting them with saliva, searching for a glint of gold. The others were watching a video of a politician who said that Nelson Mandela had sold out to white capitalists. As far as they were concerned, South African mining had been one long larceny, from start to finish.

Most of these men had worked as zama-zamas before, although some disliked the term, with its whiff of criminality. Now they had come from Khuma to pull out miners. Helping to mobilise the rescuers was Mandla Charles, who had emerged from another shaft in October and said he could not leave his comrades to die. Another organiser was Mzwandile Mkwayi, known as Shasha, a burly ex-convict who had served time for robbery and wanted to prove he had changed.

The homespun mission had been funded by neighbours, charities and online well-wishers. The police grudgingly let it proceed, on orders from the courts, while complaining that sending supplies to the miners “defeats the purpose of our ongoing operations”. In December a professional rescue service had given a quote of 11.3m rand ($620,000) to pull the men out using a mobile mechanical cage. But the government and the mine-owners were bickering about who should pay for it.

The police also said that miners could resurface at another shaft called Margaret, about 7km north as the crow flies, where there was still a working lift. Hundreds of zama-zamas had done so since the start of the operation, walking underground from other tunnels. But it appears this option was not available to those in shafts 10 and 11. An affidavit filed in December by Harmony Gold, which part-owns Margaret shaft, said that the connecting tunnels had collapsed and flooded, making it “impossible” for the miners to get there. Those who tried had turned back.

For now, the only lifeline was the rope. The rescuers from Khuma looped it through a pulley which was suspended over the shaft, then ran it around a pipe held fast with rubble. Under the watchful eyes of the police they lowered down packets of maize porridge, bundled in plastic wrap. Then they began to pull something up. A dozen men hauled at a time, vigorously at first, then slower, their shouts and chatter sapped by the heat.

The coils of dead rope piled higher as they worked. Only when the heap reached waist height, after 40 minutes of toil, did we glimpse a gaunt figure dangling from the other end, a Mozambican in a yellow raincoat, blinking in the sun. On his face was a look of astonishment – or was it fear? – and for some reason I thought of a newborn pulled from the womb into a world of dazzling light. The police chased me and another journalist away, as though embarrassed by the scene. They arrested the man while paramedics hooked him up to a drip. The rescuers were relieved: on some days, they had pulled out corpses.

Gold miners are hauled to the surface during a rescue operation at Stilfontein, South Africa. The men had been trapped underground for months during a police operation targetting illegal mining.
Photo: Tommy Trenchard

As this drama unfolded George and Alfred were still underground, a mile beneath our feet. Like most of the other miners they had come to shaft 11, which was the only place where rescuers were sending down food. They had walked for hours to get there, balancing on top of a pipe in the flooded tunnel where locomotives once ran. Now they shared a plate, a blanket and a bed.

When the makeshift rescue began a letter was sent down saying that the dead, the sick and South Africans would be pulled out first. A man from Mozambique told George and Alfred not to go, because when the last South African left nobody would care anymore and the rest would be abandoned to die. One day in December it was Alfred’s turn. He could already imagine himself outside, in the sunlight, but could not show his joy to George, who would remain behind.

George watched him go, thinking his turn would come soon. But as the days passed his hopes dwindled. “I said, ‘God, please help me, I’m not going to die here, my grave’s not going to be here.’” If the rope would not come for him, he would have to escape himself.

There was another way out, so perilous that only a starving man would risk it. Back in shaft 10 were the remains of the metal frame which had once carried a mechanical cage. It might just be possible to climb up the rusted ruins, a vertical ascent of more than a kilometre. George had seen other men try it, tying loops of rope into dangling steps. He had also heard some of them fall.

Fourteen men began the journey with him. In George’s telling, they climbed short sections at a time, resting in alcoves that had once housed electrical transformers. In one they found a soggy packet of potato crisps, which they dried on a fire of burnt rope. Otherwise they consumed nothing but water and a little salt. They slept when their watches told them it was night. The next morning they stood in a circle and prayed, before setting off again.

On the first day one of the men fell. In the darkness, the others could not see what became of him. As they climbed they passed the bodies of nine men who had tried this way before, only to slip or succumb to exhaustion: a tangle of rope and metal and bones, suspended above the void. George whispered to the spirits of the dead men as he passed. “Please guys, we are not the one that caused this,” he said. “We are not responsible for your death, but if your spirit catches us, guide us to the surface so that we can tell what is happening in here.”

On the fifth day, George said, he and his 13 surviving comrades reached the surface. Their limbs were scratched and bruised. Their hands were rigid with cramp. A waiting policeman pointed a gun at them, even though they had no strength to run. “The miners possess the means to exit independently”, said a police statement, “as demonstrated by those who have surfaced in recent days.”

On Christmas Eve the rescuers from Khuma sent down a final package of food. Their funds were running out. Three days later the mine-owners levelled the ground around the shaft, in
anticipation of professional rescue equipment arriving, although that would not happen for weeks. In the process they removed the boulders that secured the rudimentary pulley mechanism.

Nothing more would be heard from the men underground until January 9th. That day, after receiving some more donations and rebuilding the pulley system, the men from Khuma lowered a rope. A letter came back, written in neat Sesotho: “There are 109 corpses in here and people are dying every hour…We are weak and have no energy left.” A man who was pulled out had videos on a phone, showing scores of bodies, shrouded in plastic and bound with rope. In Pretoria, where the High Court was deliberating over what should be done, a judge warned that the crisis could become “the darkest point in our history”.

Only now did the government contract Mines Rescue Services, a specialist company, after agreeing to split the cost with the mining industry. Mannas Fourie, who led the operation, told me later that saving people from abandoned shafts is “one of the most extreme rescues or
recoveries that one can go into”. His team was working blind, because detailed plans of the shaft had been lost. They would drive a 45-tonne mechanical winder onto the site, but they could not even be sure that the ground by the hole would support it.

On January 13th the team used the winder to lower a cage. Nobody from the police or Mines Rescue wanted to go down, fearing the miners were armed, so Shasha and Mandla, the rescuers from Khuma, volunteered to go instead. They were greeted like gods, said Mandla later, although his overriding memory was the stench of the corpses on his hands. The cage would normally hold six people, but the survivors were so thin that 13 could fit at a time. Even so, it would take days to get everyone out.

A man is carried by paramedics to a waiting ambulance after being rescued from a disused mineshaft in Stilfontein, South Africa. A police operation to combat illegal mining aimed to force zama zamas to the surface to face arrest, but resulted in dozens starving to death underground.
Photo: Tommy Trenchard

On the second day, a team of officials arrived to address the media. “A train is coming, you step on the rail line, and a train runs over you…is that a humanitarian issue?” asked Gwede Mantashe, the minister. Most people involved in illegal mining were not South Africans, he continued. “It’s a criminal activity, it’s an attack on our economy by foreign nationals.” As he spoke the cage was still clanking up and down, a yo-yo in the void.

Then the officials climbed back into their cars without talking to anyone from Khuma. A few people shouted in frustration at their black windows. I caught sight of George watching from beneath the shade of a tree. “Why are they here?” he asked. “Are they only here to greet the dead bodies?”

By the third day there was nobody left to rescue. Of the 246 survivors, 128 were from Mozambique, 80 from Lesotho, 33 from Zimbabwe and just five from South Africa. They were detained and charged with crimes including mining without permits and entering the country illegally. Four of them died in hospital. The cage also retrieved 78 decomposing bodies. Others will never be recovered, like the corpses that George passed on his escape.

Who killed Supang and the 90 other men who are known to have died in Buffels? The famo gangs took the shafts by force. The mine-owners did not do enough to seal the holes. The government dallied over a rescue. The police knowingly starved the miners and suggested, falsely, that they could easily come out if they chose. The economy offered few other opportunities for the “ones who tried their luck”.

The South African Human Rights Commission has launched an inquiry into what happened, although a date for the hearings has not been set. A coalition of civil-society groups is calling for criminal charges against the officials they consider responsible for the “mass murder” of the miners. But there is little public outrage; on social media some suggested the miners got what they deserved. Ramaphosa has said nothing about the deaths.

As for George and Alfred, their days of going underground are done. “I’ve seen all these things, they’re all in my head,” said George, while the laughter of his daughter tinkled through the window. Here at his modest home in Khuma is where he wanted to be now, with his mother’s pot plants and his children’s school certificates and the Orlando Pirates playing football on television. He has since been convicted of illegal mining and spent four days in prison before gathering the money to pay a 7,000 rand ($400) fine. Alfred’s case is ongoing.

Sometimes, in my conversations with them, the two old friends spoke of ubuntu, a traditional African philosophy that encourages people to find their humanity through helping others. They did not deny that they had broken the law. But they wondered what ubuntu meant to the ministers and the police, who had punished those crimes with a de facto death sentence. “I’m not going to lie,” said Alfred, as though ushering up the voices of the dead. “They killed us.”

Photographer: Tommy Trenchard

Killing for the photo

“Perhaps you can help me understand something which appears very bewildering to me,” Fouad Abdel-Moneim Riad asked the witness. At 71 years-old, the Egyptian judge had a wealth of international legal experience and an inquisitive mind.

“We have here at least ten pictures which I wondered how they were taken,” he said. “It is pictures taken of an execution, step by step. How can a person who is killing in this way take a photographer with him to picture it?”

It was Wednesday, September 22, 1999, almost a year into the trial of Bosnian Serb Goran Jelisić at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, in The Hague.

Jelisić, 31-years-old at the time, had pleaded guilty to the murder of 13 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, among other charges.

That morning, the court was shown a series of photographs that appeared to show Jelisić killing a man in cold blood in Brčko, northern Bosnia, in 1992. They were taken by a professional photographer and published worldwide by Reuters, a major international news agency.

Jelisić listened attentively to the trial in a green patterned knitted sweater, his expression timid.

British prosecutor Geoffrey Nice described the first image: the accused is on the right in a blue, short-sleeved shirt, a gun fitted with a silencer in his lowered right hand; to his left, a man in military uniform with an automatic rifle; in front of them, two men, one in a brown suede jacket, the other in a beige pullover; they are moving along a short cul-de-sac, at the end of which can be seen a number of dead bodies.

The next photograph shows Jelisić pointing the gun at the back of the man in the brown jacket; in the next, Jelisić has raised the gun level with the man’s head, pulled into his shoulders; in the next, the man is bent over at the waist, his hands raised to his head as if trying to protect himself. He is still walking.

Then the man is on the ground, one leg in the air, Jelisić behind him, gun still raised. In the photographs that follow, the man is face-down on the concrete but, from the various positions of his arms and legs, clearly still alive. Jelisić is still pointing the gun at him.

The next image shows the man in the beige jumper lying on his side on the ground, a pool of blood spreading from his head. The next captures both men on the ground, bleeding heavily. Another image shows corpses tossed into a pit, one on top of the other, limbs intertwined. Some of the faces are visible. There are at least 12, all men. Above the grave stands a truck, presumably used to transport the bodies, and an excavator poised to cover them with earth.

Before the witness, ICTY investigator Paul Anthony Basham, could answer Judge Riad’s question, Nice asked that the trial be moved into closed session. The transcripts, therefore, do not reveal how the photographs came about. Those photographs, entered as exhibit P67, were important in the trial as proof; there was no examination of how they had been taken. Only Judge Riad was bothered by that.

This story offers an answer to Judge Riad’s question. It is the story of how those photographs came to be – the only images from years of war in the former Yugoslavia that captured the actual act of execution.

Such images are rare in the annals of professional war photography. None, for example, have yet emerged from the war in Ukraine.

Like Judge Riad, I had long wondered about the unsettling proximity of the camera, how it captured the precise moment of death. I wanted to know whose gaze, and what kind of gaze, mediated the sequence for those of us who would view it.

How could a photographer capture a murder from so close, and in so many frames? Didn’t the killer see the camera? Why did he allow the photographs to be taken? And why did he let the photographer keep the film?

Professional war photography is an act of non-interference. Does the act of taking pictures in this case constitute a form of participation? Does the camera’s proximity encourage what is happening? Did Judge Riad’s question weigh on the minds of the Reuters editors who bought and distributed the photos worldwide? Or on the jury of the World Press Photo awards, which decorated the photographer in 1993? Was there any doubt among the Dutch media that feted him as a journalistic hero when he fled Belgrade for Amsterdam the same year? And what were other photographers covering the conflict thinking?

To truly understand what was photographed and, most importantly, how, we need to zoom out, to retrace the steps backwards from image to reality. For while a photo might evoke a thousand emotions, it cannot speak a thousand words.

The wars in Yugoslavia unfolded in front of the eyes of the world’s media, yet this did little to shorten their duration: four-and-a-half years in Croatia, almost four in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and more than a year in Kosovo. Over 2,500 articles, recordings, and photographs were used as evidence at the ICTY, according to data from the Media Centre in Sarajevo.

But of all these images and recordings, those of Jelisić in Brčko are the only professional photographs to capture an execution as it unfolded.

One of the most iconic news photographs of the 20th century was taken in 1968 in Saigon, showing South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting from point-blank range at the head of Viet Cong guerrilla Nguyen Van Lem. It was taken by the American photographer Eddie Adams for the Associated Press and earned him a Pulitzer Prize and World Press Photo award. The police chief permitted Adams to take the photograph, convinced of the righteousness of his act. Adams’s photograph fuelled anti-war protests in the United States, much to his dismay; he was a former Marine and supported American involvement on the side of the South Vietnamese. The dead man had murdered American soldiers.

The circumstances surrounding the creation of Adams’s image are well-documented. After all, there were many witnesses. In Brčko, however, there were none. Two killers, two victims, two photographers. Or was someone else present?

The photographs were taken on May 6 or 7, 1992. The exact date was never established during the trial. At the time, Brčko had a population of 41,046; Bosniaks were the majority and Serbs the biggest minority. The war in Bosnia was a month old. It reached Brčko at dawn on April 30, along with Goran Jelisić, a Serb volunteer fighter from nearby Bijeljina. At 23, he had a young son, a primary school diploma and a job driving tractors.

Three months earlier, Jelisić had been released from prison after serving time for forging cheques. He had a fondness for money, as the trial would demonstrate, and would steal money, watches and jewellery from Bosniak detainees. In Brčko, he was issued with a blue Yugoslav police uniform, a Scorpion pistol fitted with a silencer, and a Motorola radio. His codename was Adolf. During the trial, a protected witness identified as Witness L recalled Jelisić saying:

“Hitler was the first Adolf. I am the second.”

As Serb soldiers, police officers and paramilitaries poured into the town, Bosniak and Croat males between the ages of 16 and 60 were rounded up; some were taken to the police station in the town centre, where roughly 20 were held in Room 13.

It was from Room 13 that Jelisić took the man in the brown jacket. Why him, specifically, remains unclear. Was he the first person Jelisić laid eyes on when he opened the door? Was he wearing an expensive watch? Did someone have it in for him? Jelisić said it was his first murder but couldn’t recall how many shots he fired.

“Maybe two or three bullets,” he said.

The killing established a pattern: all Jelisić’s other known victims were executed with a silenced Scorpion, from close range and from behind. Later, there would be less blood than in the photographs. Jelisić would instruct his victims to bend their heads over a drain cover so their blood would drain away, minimising the cleanup.

Jelisić was convicted of murdering 13 people. How many he killed in total during the three weeks he spent in Brčko in May 1992 was never established. Since he confessed to the murders he was charged with, the prosecution did not pursue his responsibility for any further victims. According to Witness L, Jelisić claimed he needed to execute twenty to thirty people before he could have his morning coffee. Another, Witness A, vividly recalled Jelisić’s voice because he heard him ten to fifteen times a day giving the order:

“Lie down and put your head over the drain!”

Some former detainees testified that they witnessed Jelisić’s killings and were ordered by him to stack the bodies for transport in a meat truck to a mass grave. Some witnesses said bodies were also taken to an animal feed factory, where they were processed into animal meal. One, Witness N, recalled seeing around a hundred bodies “piled up like logs ready for the furnace”. Prosecutors estimated Jelisić’s death toll at around a hundred, maybe more.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina produced many killers. Teachers, policemen and farmers before the war became war criminals during it. But few killed so prolifically or systematically as Jelisić, one after another after another. That’s why the sentence he received was, at that point, the longest ever handed down at the ICTY: forty years in prison.

One witness described Jelisić in terms that might apply to anyone: “A young man in his twenties, brownish hair, medium height, medium build, rather lively.”

Bojan Stojanović was 22 years-old at the time, a photographer from Belgrade working for the daily newspaper Večernje novosti [Evening News]. He photographed all sorts, from sports to daily life. He also sometimes worked for Reuters. In early May 1992, Stojanović and his friend and Večernje novosti colleague Srđan Petrović were heading to Sarajevo on assignment for Reuters but ended up in Brčko.

Reuters photographer Emil Vaš was the first to receive the photographs. “When I saw them, I couldn’t believe it,” he said in an interview. “You can’t believe that someone would take pictures like that. We didn’t even know if it was real. We didn’t know what to do with them.”

Petar Kujundžić, then the chief photographer at Reuters in Belgrade, said his first thought was that they had been staged. He asked Stojanović and Petrović how they had taken them. They replied that they had simply been passing and ran into the killings. “I was suspicious because I knew no one in their right mind would allow such a thing to be photographed,” Kujundžić said. He remembered seeing at least two rolls of film. He also saw those taken by Petrović and recalled that they were much the same.

Kujundžić took the shots to Donald Forbes, the Reuters bureau chief for Yugoslavia at the time. In written communication for this story, Forbes did not dwell much on how the photographs were taken but stated in general terms that photographs were accepted based on trust. He remembered Stojanović as a good photographer but a loose cannon. “At one point, he got a white Golf stolen from the VW factory in Bosnia and put a UN sign on it on his own initiative, which got both himself and the Reuters Sarajevo office in trouble with the UN,” he recounted. Although he initially said he “would certainly have been involved in the decision to use” the photographs, he later wrote that the decision to publish was made by the Reuters editorial team in London and that it was up to them to assess the ethics of doing so.

At the time, Pat Benic was Reuters Photo Editor in London, responsible for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When I asked Benic if there were any doubts in London regarding the photos, he said: “I recall there was a hold in London on those graphic images until we could verify everything via Belgrade before we transmitted them. The hold lasted hours, not days, as the information was verified.” He did not clarify what was done to “verify” the images.

From May 9 onwards, the photographs were published worldwide, credited variously to Bojan Srdjan/Reuters and Srdjan Bojan/Reuters. They were released under very slight variations of the following caption: “A Serbian policeman executes a Muslim sniper with a shot to the back of the head after he was captured near Brčko and accused of shooting at a Serbian refugee convoy.”

Stojanović submitted one of the Brčko photos to the World Press Photo competition. In February 1993, he was declared winner in the Spot News category. The same month, Stojanović left Serbia for the Netherlands. He never returned.

In the Netherlands, Stojanović sought political asylum, claiming he faced persecution from the Serbian authorities and that his life was in danger. Judging by the Dutch media coverage, he was welcomed as a dissident. The public broadcaster even compared him to Salman Rushdie. In interviews, Stojanović explained how the photographs came about. Each version differed slightly from the last, but he maintained he managed to take them unnoticed, and that he slipped away also unnoticed.

Stojanović claimed that after the images were published, a bomb was thrown at the building in Belgrade where he lived with his parents. He told De Stem: “The leader of a Serbian militia has put a price on my head, $20,000. Because I am a traitor to the country. The search warrant against me was shown on Serbian television and appeared in the newspapers.” He said he was arrested in November 1992 and accused of the attempted murder of a woman whom he claimed he didn’t even know. In another interview, he said he was arrested for “alleged robbery” and that, while in custody, he was interrogated about the photographs and accused of espionage. On release two months later, he claimed all his photography equipment, 4,000 negatives, and documents had been taken from his apartment. That was when he decided to flee, but since he didn’t have a passport, he said he crossed illegally into Bulgaria on the roof of a train. In several interviews, Stojanović said that Reuters helped him escape.

In response to an inquiry, the Second Municipal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade said it could find no record from 1992 or 1993 of an attack on Bojan Stojanović. None of the people I spoke to – journalists and photographers close to him – knew anything about bombs being thrown at his building. Forbes, the Reuters bureau chief in Belgrade, also said he did not recall seeing anything on television about a warrant issued against Stojanović.

Forbes and Benic both denied that Reuters helped Stojanović escape. “It was a company rule that if a staff member was wanted by the authorities in any country for any reason, they would remain in place to provide full cooperation. I never received any official approach in Serbia regarding either photographer or the photographs,” Forbes told me in 2022. He died in February 2025.

In April 1993, Dutch media reported that two Serbs had kidnapped and tried to kill Stojanović in Amsterdam. NRC Handelsblad reported: “Threatened with a gun, he was forced to get into a car. The kidnappers drove the journalist to the Mauritskade. There they tried to strangle him with a piece of steel wire. The 23-year-old Stojanović hit the men with his camera. He managed to escape his killers by diving into the canal.”

The same year, Dutch public broadcaster VPRO produced and aired a half-hour documentary about Stojanović titled De prijs (The Price). In the film, Stojanović is seen eating salad and toast, chewing loudly while he shows his photographs from the war in Bosnia – wounded soldiers, the bodies of civilians. Of the award-winning photograph from Brčko, he says: “This guy is a Muslim. Why he died, I don’t know. I was just there, and it all happened in a moment.” He repeats his claim that the killers didn’t take any notice of him even though, he says, he was just three metres behind Jelisić.

The film follows Stojanović to the World Press Photo exhibition, where he observes the enlarged version of his winning photograph, accompanied by a caption based on the original under which it was published. Addressing a man who appears to be involved in organising the exhibition, Stojanović says: “Actually, this man wasn’t a sniper. He was just a civilian.” The man nods and replies: “Yeah.” He betrays no surprise at learning that that image is perpetuating a lie about a murdered man.

I spoke to the film’s co-director, Thomas Doebele. He said the film crew assumed Stojanović was a legitimate photographer, his credibility backed by the fact he had won such a prestigious award. Doebele did not recall the identity of the man whom Stojanović told that the victim wasn’t a sniper. Neither did anyone at the World Press Photo Foundation.

For years, the caption accompanying the winning photograph on the WPP website read: Ruthless killing in the streets in early summer. Accused of firing on a Serbian refugee convoy, a Muslim sniper is captured by a uniformed Serbian policeman and shot in the back of the head. After I sent the documentary footage to WPP, they changed ‘sniper’ to ‘civilian’ in the caption on their website – thirty years after the falsehood had been aired on Dutch public television.

Now, next to the photograph and the corrected caption, there is a note that reads: “This caption previously identified the victim as a sniper. We have been provided a video where the photographer says this is not correct. Therefore the caption was edited on 21 July 2022.”

In checking Stojanović’s claims from 1993, it emerged that he had indeed been in detention in Belgrade at the end of 1992. So too had his colleague, Petrović. Not because they were falsely accused, but because Stojanović, Petrović, and two other men were convicted of robbing an elderly woman in Belgrade, as confirmed by the Higher Court in Belgrade. Of the four, Stojanović was handed the longest sentence – 16 months.

Photographer Kamenko Pajić told to me that he witnessed Stojanović confess to the Reuters bureau chief, Forbes, saying he had robbed “a grandma” and didn’t want to go to prison. Nor did he. Because he fled to the Netherlands and never returned.

Stephen Mayes was head of the jury for the 1993 World Press Photo awards when Stojanović won the Spot News prize. He remembers the photograph, but not any discussion among the jury members about it. That year, according to the World Press Photo Foundation, 1,969 photographers from 84 countries submitted 19,428 pictures for consideration. The Spot News category covered everything from celebrity weddings to elections. Mayes said that in the first round of judging, the nine jury members spent perhaps a second on each photo. It’s “bang bang bang, yes or no”, he said. In the next round, they had a few seconds per photograph, and only in the third and final round, which included just a few dozen photos, did the jury receive any information about the actual images and the photographers behind them. “It’s ‘noise’ from a crowd of photos, and those that break through that noise usually have some instant drama,” Mayes said.

More than once in the past decade, the credibility of documentary images has been called into question, usually over accusations of manipulation and post-processing of digitally produced photographs. Only in 2015 did WPP introduce a code of ethics stating, among other things, that photographers must ensure captions are accurate and must be open and transparent about how their images came about.

Halfway through my research, I was given a confidential excerpt of the record taken during Goran Jelisić’s 1998 interrogation by two ICTY investigators. Part of it reads:

“On May 6 or 7, 1992, Goran was called into the chief’s office, where the police chief Dragan Veselić, Đorđe Ristanić, and Enver, known as ‘Shock,’ were present. Veselić told him that he would have his ‘baptism by fire,’ and then Đorđe Ristanić explained how many things had been done in Brčko that needed to be corrected, and then told him and Enver that two journalists (Srđan and Bojan) were waiting for them outside to photograph how the two of them would kill two Muslims, and that these photographs would be used as propaganda material, ‘to show how Muslims kill Serbs,’ after which they would go in front of the station where an empty coffin had been placed and mourn for the supposedly killed Serbs, which the journalists would also photograph. Jelisić further stated that Enver took two unknown Bosniaks out of room no. 13, whom they then led to the crafts center, and on that occasion, Goran shot one of them with a Scorpion, and Enver shot the other with an automatic rifle, which the journalists photographed. Then they returned to the front of the station to the empty coffin and joined a girl named Violeta, who was crying and lamenting for the supposedly killed Serbs.”

Can the word of a mass murderer be trusted? John Ralston, who at the time was the chief investigator at the ICTY’s Office of the Prosecutor, told me in an interview that there was no reason for Jelisić to lie. There were enough witnesses and evidence against him, even without those photographs. Twenty-five took the stand against him.

The man in the brown suede jacket was listed in the trial in The Hague as unidentified. His name, however, was Husein Kršo. When he was killed, Husein was 34 years and five months old. He was a waiter in Brčko. He wasn’t a member of any party, organisation, or army. Husein was married. His oldest son was nine years old. A month after his death, his second son turned six. Seven months after his death, his wife Džana gave birth to their third son. His brother had brought him the brown suede jacket from Switzerland, Husein’s middle son, Mustafa Kršo, told me when we met in Brčko. Mustafa came instead of his mother, who he said was not up to discussing what happened.

In May 1992, as Brčko fell, the Yugoslav People’s Army separated men from women and children. The family wanted to flee, but Husein wasn’t allowed to leave. They last saw him a few days before he was killed. Mustafa remembered saying goodbye to his father near the military garrison. They were all in tears. His father gave his mother some money and said, “Don’t worry about anything.”

They didn’t know what happened to Husein until 1993, when his eldest son Nedžad, then 10 years-old, was watching TV and screamed, “Mom, there’s dad!” Dad’s gait, dad’s jacket, dad’s shirt, dad’s loafers. There was no doubt.

“The first information about dad’s fate came to us through Bojan Stojanović’s photograph,” Mustafa said.

The man in the beige sweater, who was killed alongside him, was a friend of Husein’s. Hajrudin Muzurović. He was 39 years-old, a talented floorer. Hajrudin had planned to marry in May 1992, the month he was killed. An ordinary civilian, like Husein. The man in the camouflage uniform who killed Hajrudin was Enver Stravički, known as “Shock”. He was a volunteer from Serbia, who later died.

Mustafa knew only what was reported in the media about his father’s death. But he wondered: Was his father killed because the photographer was there? Maybe he would have been killed anyway. On another day, or maybe never. Some detainees were released from the police station. Many were taken to a detention camp, from which some escaped. Many were tortured and then killed. He would prefer to think his father wasn’t tortured, that he died quickly.

“If the photographer paid for the murder, to me he’s the same as Jelisić,” Mustafa said.

The story that Stojanović and Petrović paid Jelisić for the murder has circulated in Belgrade photography circles for years. It originated with Srđan Ilić, a photographer who worked for the Associated Press during the Yugoslav wars. I called Ilić in 2019; he didn’t want to talk about it. I called him again in 2022; he said he had decided not to talk about the wars anymore. I told him I would use instead a previous comment attributed to him, in which he claimed that the photographers had paid Jelisić. I asked him if he still stood by what he was quoted as saying. Ilić said to leave him out of the text entirely, if possible, and if not, to use that earlier comment, in Sandra Vitaljić’s 2013 book War of Images: Contemporary War Photography. In the book, Ilić is quoted as saying: “Stojanović showed up at the Writers’ Club restaurant in Belgrade with a pile of printed pictures of that event and talked at the table about how they paid that Adolf 500 marks to kill those few Muslims.”

Every photographer I spoke to knew about the story, but no one else said they had heard it directly from Stojanović or Petrović. Only Srđan Ilić.

Stojanović claims to be deeply disturbed by the accusation that he and Petrović paid for the photographs.

I tracked him down months after I had been told he was no longer alive. He has been living in Spain for the last decade. He moved there from the Netherlands because of his partner. When I got in touch, Stojanović said he wanted us to “get to know each other first” and see whether or not I use my brain. He asked if I was married. Did I have children? Did I have a lover? When I mentioned Srđan Ilić, he became angry. He said Ilić made up the story about the payment because he was jealous. “It’s such naïve stupidity that I can’t believe people accepted it,” he said.

The account Stojanović gave me about how he came to photograph the murders differed from those he gave to Dutch media in 1993. This time, he said Jelisić knew he was being photographed. In fact, Jelisić spoke to him briefly afterwards. Stojanović said he and Petrović knew that people would be killed. I told him what Jelisić had told the investigators in The Hague, that the shooting was staged to portray Serbs as the victims of Muslims. Stojanović laughed and said it was “new information” to him. He said that he and Petrović thought the photographs would change the world for the better, maybe even stop the war.

So why did Jelisić permit himself to be photographed in the act?

“Because he was proud to defend the Serbian ideology,” Stojanović replied. “It was done by a Serb who was crazy.”

“Why didn’t anyone else in the whole war allow such a thing?” I asked.

“How should I know? Probably they were smarter than Jelisić.”

“Of all the war criminals, Jelisić is the dumbest?”

“You said that.”

Petrović also fled to the Netherlands. Like Stojanović, he was granted political asylum but eventually returned to Serbia, where he built a career flying private jets. Petrović hasn’t given up photography and now shoots Formula 1. I called him in September 2023, and we talked over the phone. He said that the day before they left for Bosnia, he and Stojanović heard that something was happening in Brčko and decided to go. In the town centre, they saw two men leading two others somewhere. Petrović said he asked the one in the police uniform – whom he later learned was Jelisić – where they were taking them. “He said, ‘We’re taking them to a wedding,’ and grinned,” Petrović recalled. Speaking about the man he was about to kill, Jelisić then added, according to Petrović: “This is my 180-something; let me make it two hundred and go home.” They were two metres away from him, Petrović said. The wide-angle lens confirms it. When the shooting started, Petrović and Stojanović began to take pictures. He said they were shocked.

“You know how journalists go to war? They sit ten kilometres away from the battles, get drunk, and make up stories,” Petrović told me. “We always pushed to go where the action was. We were young, brave, crazy, and ambitious. We got the chance to work for a big company, finally paid properly, everything we dreamed of.”

While in ICTY custody, Jelisić became friendly with Bosnian detainee Esad Landžo, who was later convicted of war crimes against Serbs. When we met two years ago in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Landžo recalled an occasion when Jelisić grew angry because he hadn’t received certain documents from the police in Brčko that could have helped his case. According to Landžo, he began ranting and raving and claimed that “a journalist paid him to film that murder”. Landžo said he remembered the outburst “one hundred percent,” but didn’t know the details – whether Jelisić was paid to kill the men or he was going to kill them anyway and was paid to be photographed in the act.

In 2003, Jelisić was transferred from The Hague to Italy to serve his prison sentence. I spent ten months trying to get permission to visit him. I was rejected by both the prison and the Italian Ministry of Justice. During April 2023, after he was transferred to Belgium, he called me often from a phone in his cell. He was polite, open to questions, and hopeful that he would be granted early release despite already being denied twice. He claimed that the photographing of the murder in Brčko was arranged as propaganda. It happened on May 6, he said. Jelisić was in the office of police chief Dragan Veselić, who, along with Brčko’s mayor, Đorđe Ristanić, arranged for the murders to be portrayed to the world as Muslims killing Serbs. Veselić was later killed. Ristanić has refused to speak to journalists.

Jelisić told me a girl was also present. She was hired to mourn the supposed Serb victims.

Violeta. She was 16 years old at the time. Originally from the nearby town of Bijeljina, she came to Brčko in 1992 to be with her boyfriend, a soldier.

Violeta was also mentioned during Jelisić’s trial in The Hague. “I just remember she was carrying a camera and standing next to him,” a protected witness said. “Then she said, ‘Goran, is this your 53rd or 54th?’” As she spoke, the witness said, Violeta raised her hand and mimicked pulling a trigger.

Violeta’s boyfriend was killed that same year, 1992. Her mother came to Brčko at the time to take her home.

I found Violeta’s mother on her porch in the village of Međaši, near Bijeljina. It was June 2023 and Slobodanka Zarić, known as Seka, was 67 years old. She received me without prior notice because I arrived with an acquaintance of hers, a lawyer and fellow Međaši resident called Duško Tomić, who has handled war crimes cases for decades. Seka denied being in Brčko in May 1992. I read her the write-up I had received of Jelisić’s interrogation by ICTY investigators. She said she had never seen Jelisić in person. I showed her the photographs of the murder. She shook her head and said she had never seen them before. Both Tomić and I came away believing she was telling the truth. That night, I travelled back to Zagreb.

Early the next morning, Seka went to Tomić’s house and told him that, in fact, she had been in Brčko at the time of the murders and that they had unfolded as I described. Her daughter, Violeta, had been hired to mourn the supposed Serb victims.

I called Violeta. She never picked up.

Additional reporting: Ruben Brugnera and Natalija Jovanović

The investigation was supported by Journalismfund