“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