Our son was killed doing his job. We won’t stop until we know what really happened
Two years on, the family of journalist Christopher Allen is still seeking answers.
Christopher Allen never managed to publish a word from South Sudan. But situated deep in the bush on the front line between warring rebels and government forces, the young journalist wrote; poetically and prodigiously.
“War is measured in absolutes,” reads a diary entry in the days before his murder. “In men lost or killed, in towns taken or overrun. Politicians might play with the numbers – but we know the sadness of missing faces, the satisfaction of victory, the strength of sensations of a life lived on the cusp of death...”
Days later the 26-year-old, who held dual US and British nationality, was gunned down during a rebel offensive against South Sudanese government forces in the strategic town of Kaya, based near the Congolese and Ugandan borders.
Allen was a freelance journalist who had previously reported from other conflict zones, including for The Telegraph as one of the first journalists on the scene of the MH17 plane crash in Ukraine in 2014. He travelled to South Sudan in the summer of 2017 to cover the civil war, which erupted in 2013 and has killed an estimated 400,000 people, uprooting millions.
He was murdered while embedded with rebel forces, riddled with bullets before being stripped and photographed – the gruesome photographs eventually circulated on social media.
This August will mark the third year since Allen’s death and his family remain desperate for answers. Earlier this week in the House of Lords, peers sought to spark some official action by calling for an independent review into his murder.
Lord Black of Brentwood called on the Government to ensure justice is delivered over what he described as the “vicious killing of Christopher Allen by government soldiers as he did his job – bearing witness to conflict” – describing the absence of an independent investigation as “intolerable”.
Citing the murders of 125 journalists worldwide in the past two years, Lord Black, chairman of the Commonwealth Press Union and deputy chairman of the Telegraph Media Group, said it is “unacceptable” that Allen’s family had not received justice.
In response to his question, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, a Foreign Office minister, insisted the British authorities were working “very closely” with the US, and continued to press the South Sudanese authorities for answers.
Jeremy Bliss, Christopher Allen’s cousin, who lives in London, welcomed the intervention in the Lords as progress, but insisted: “The Government must now listen to these strong words and transform them into actions.”
From the moment news of the killing emerged, Bliss (a lawyer by training) has helped lead the family’s efforts to find answers.
“I found him a pretty shy but serious and focused young man,” Bliss recalls of his cousin. “He was incredibly bright and exacting in his choice of words. Everything was very purposefully told.”
They shared a mutual love of history, art and literature, but whenever Allen spoke about his desire to travel to South Sudan (as he often did), his cousin would try to dissuade him.
“He really was deeply moved by the people caught up in the scourge of war,” Bliss says. “People who didn’t choose to be.”
He only discovered Allen had gone to South Sudan in August 2017 when the pair exchanged Facebook messages. Bliss admits his heart sank. “I thought: ‘he actually did it’.”
The last message he wrote to his cousin was “stay safe”. Later that
‘He was deeply moved by the people caught up in the scourge of war’
same evening he discovered he had been killed. The family was instantly plunged into a nightmare from which it hasn’t emerged. Over the next few days they fought to retrieve his body from the South Sudanese. They discovered it had been flown back by helicopter to the capital Juba and was being stored unrefrigerated in a military hospital.
It took two harrowing weeks to eventually fly Allen’s body out – by which time whatever forensic evidence there might have been was long lost. A chance for the UK to hold an inquest into his death was missed when the plane briefly touched down at Heathrow en route to the US.
When the photographs of his body emerged on social media, Bliss felt obliged to document them in case they were required for later evidence – an experience so terrible he struggles to describe it today. Eventually the photographs were removed after pressure on the South Sudanese authorities from the US.
Initial reports claimed Allen was the victim of crossfire, but that was discounted after it emerged he had been shot five times by government soldiers. In February last year, a Canadian journalist, who has since been expelled from the country, travelled to Kaya and interviewed government troops who admitted they had seen the unarmed Allen filming during the gun battle and decided to shoot him all the same.
The FBI has so far declined to launch an investigation, so too the United Nations. South Sudan continues to resist all calls for answers. Last February its government was accused of a culture of “pervasive impunity” according to a report by the UN Commission on Human Rights.
Earlier this month, the US, South Sudan’s principal international backer, which has poured billions into the country since it declared independence in 2011, imposed sanctions on the country’s vicepresident, citing his involvement in human rights abuses. The month before, the US blacklisted two government ministers, accusing them of perpetuating the conflict.
Despite the complex geopolitical backdrop, Bliss declines to be drawn into conspiracy theories as to the lack of official investigation.
“The only thing I can see is big failures,” he says. “South Sudan doesn’t care about the lives of journalists. That is the bottom line.”
In their continued fight for justice, the family hope this dreadful episode will bring about meaningful protections for journalists across the world.
There is a bitter irony in all of this, Bliss admits, which his cousin would have detested. “He would hate the story being about him.”