Five questioned over murder of British journalist in Amazon

BRAZILIAN police are investigating five suspects in connection with the murders of a British journalist and an indigenous expert, The Daily Telegraph understands.

Human remains believed to be those of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were located on Wednesday night, 10 days after the pair went missing in a remote part of the Amazon rainforest.

It came after Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira and his brother Oseney confessed to shooting dead the men and hiding their bodies.

The assailants pursued Mr Phillips and Mr Pereira as they travelled by boat on the Itaquaí river, deep in the western Brazilian Amazon, according to police.

The suspects confessed to shooting the pair, sinking their boat and taking their bodies roughly two miles into the forest. Federal police hoped to uncover the wreckage of the boat yesterday.

They are questioning five suspects, three of whom are suspected of committing the murder. One is suspected of disposing of the bodies, and another suspected of ordering the crime.

Police offered no motive for the killings, but earlier said Mr Pereira’s work to stop illegal fishing in an indigenous reserve had angered local fishermen.

Mr Pereira had received death threats, with witnesses saying some of the suspects had threatened him and Mr Phillips the day before their murder.

Mr Phillips, a former contributor to The Washington Post and The Guardian, and Mr Pereira, a former Brazilian indigenous rights official, were on a research trip for a book on sustainable development in the Amazon when they vanished on June 5. Confirmation of their murder has outraged their families and colleagues, who accused Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, and his government of failing to protect environmentalists.

Alessandra Sampaio, Mr Phillips’s wife, thanked the campaigners who had demanded a “rapid response” from the Brazilian government. “Now we can bring them home,” she said.

Beatriz Matos, Mr Pereira’s wife, said: “Now that Bruno’s spirit is roaming through the forest and inside each one of us, our strength will be much greater.”

Ana Toni, of the Brazilian Institute for Climate and Society (Instituto Clima e Sociedade), said that the murder “is concrete proof of the total absence of the Brazilian state in the Amazon and in the defence of [those] who are giving their lives to fight against the deforestation of the Amazon”.