Last images of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira found on recovered phone
Some of the last images of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira have been found after Indigenous activists recovered a mobile phone Pereira was carrying when the two men were killed in the Brazilian Amazon last year.
The phone was found last October when activists from Univaja, the Indigenous association where Pereira worked, returned to a stretch of flooded forest along the Itaquaí River where the men’s bodies were taken after they were shot dead on their boat on the morning of 5 June 2022.
With the help of a metal detector, the group found several items belonging to the victims, including Phillips’s UK press card, two spiral notebooks the journalist and longtime Guardian contributor had taken on the fourday reporting trip into the Javari valley region, and one of two phones Pereira was carrying.
Indigenous activists and police found other items belonging to the men in the same location during last year’s 10-day search for their bodies.
After months underwater, Phillips’s notebooks were illegible. But federal police forensic teams were able to recover several images from the handset, according to the Brazilian broadcaster Globoplay, which was with the Indigenous activists when they made the discovery.
They include one photograph, taken on the afternoon of Friday 3 June, that shows the British journalist chatting to a local man in Ladário, the riverside village where one of his alleged killers, Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, grew up. The man Phillips is talking to is Oliveira’s brother-in-law, Laurindo Alves.
Another photograph, taken shortly after 7am on Sunday 5 June, shows Phillips
sitting in a boat near São Rafael, another fishing village on the Itaquaí. Minutes later, after casting off from that community, Phillips and Pereira came under attack.
Da Costa de Oliveira and another local fisher, Jefferson da Silva Lima, last year confessed to the crime, telling police they were moved by anger over Pereira’s “persecution” of fishers the activist accused of illegal poaching in Indigenous lands. However, when they appeared before a federal judge earlier this month the two men offered a dramatically different version, claiming Pereira had attacked them and they had shot back in self-defence. The victims’ families and friends dismissed those claims as having no basis in reality.
The recovered phone also contained two short videos which appear to support descriptions of the events in the days leading up to last year’s killings.
Those videos, shot at just before 8am on 4 June 2022, show Oliveira travelling down the Itaquaí River past the shack where Phillips and Pereira were staying in a riverside community called Lago do Jaburu, just a few hundred metres from the entrance to the Javari valley Indigenous territory.
Earlier that morning, members of EVU, the Indigenous patrol team Pereira helped create, spotted Oliveira travelling in the other direction, towards the protection base at the entrance to the Indigenous enclave. Indigenous patrollers say Oliveira threatened them by raising his gun into the air when he was challenged.
The owner of the house where Phillips and Pereira were staying, a local fisher called Raimundo Bento da Costa, remembered the British journalist photographing Oliveira at the Indigenous expert’s request as he returned along the Itaquaí.
“Bruno told [Dom] to take a photo and he took one … and showed it to us afterwards. [Oliveira] had loads of cartridges, red ones, [on his belt],” said Costa, who is Oliveira’s uncle.
Twenty-four hours after those images were taken, according to their confessions, Oliveira and Jefferson da Silva Lima ambushed and killed Phillips and Pereira as they came down the same river on their way to the town of Atalaia do Norte.
The phone also contained a selfie Pereira had taken during another mission in the Javari valley in May last year, as well as two aerial videos from a flyover during which illegal mining dredges were spotted along the region’s Jaquirana River.