Killing for the Photo

Wednesday morning, September 22, 1999, began like any other day at the courtroom of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The court was in session to try Goran Jelisić, a Serb from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Presiding Judge Claude Jorda entered the courtroom that day, one of the three judges overseeing the case, alongside Fouad Riad and Almiro Simoes Rodrigues.
Jorda, then in his early fifties, was a relaxed Frenchman with an easy smile, tasked with a gravely serious mission at the first international war crimes tribunal since Nuremberg and Tokyo. He was normally attentive to his colleagues, especially the interpreters, aware of their crucial role in a multilingual trial. Occasionally, he would ask the defense or the prosecution if they had slept well. Once, when a joke he made didn’t sit well with the defense, he defended himself by saying, “I’m trying to reach the level of British humor, which is legendary, but I don’t think I’m able to do that.”
On that Wednesday morning, however, he didn’t attempt any humor; he knew that soon the courtroom would see photographs graphically depicting Jelisić committing murder.
At ten past ten, he asked those present to take their seats and for the accused to be brought in. Goran Jelisić, 31 years old, entered the courtroom wearing a greenish knitted sweater, his expression meek. Judge Jorda then greeted – in the customary order – the interpreters, the prosecution, the defense counsel, and the accused. By this point, Jelisić’s trial had been running for nearly a year. He had pleaded guilty to, among other crimes, the murders of 13 people during the war.
The prosecutor Geoffrey Nice continued the previous day’s cross-examination of ICTY investigator Bernard O’Donnell, after which defense attorney Michael Greaves questioned him in cross-examination. Then, a second prosecution investigator Paul Anthony Basham took the stand. Both O’Donnell and Basham had extensively interrogated Goran Jelisić a year earlier as part of the investigation. Between 25 and 30 hours in total. Before the photographs, marked as evidence P67, were shown to the court that morning, Judge Jorda warned the audience that they were disturbing and advised anyone sensitive to leave the room.
The prosecutor Nice described the first photograph. The accused, in a short-sleeved blue shirt, with a silenced Scorpion pistol lowered in his right hand. To his left stood a man in military uniform with an automatic rifle. In front of them were two men, one in a brown leather jacket and other in a beige sweater. They were walking down a dead-end street, at the end of which lifeless bodies lay. In the next photograph, Jelisić pointed the Scorpion at the back of the man in the brown jacket. Both men’s heads were hunched between their shoulders, and their bodies were bent forward. In the next, Jelisić raised the Scorpion to the level of the man’s head, which was now further withdrawn into his body, with his shoulders raised and pressed against his neck. In the following image, the man’s body was bent forward at the waist, his arm raised to his head as if trying to protect himself. He was still walking. The next photo captured the moment of the fall. The man was on the ground, one leg raised in the air. Jelisić stood behind him, still pointing the Scorpion.
There were many photographs, each moment of the execution recorded. In the eighth and ninth photos, the man lay face down on the concrete. He was clearly still alive, as his legs were in different positions in the two photos, and one arm was raised in the air. Jelisić continued to shoot him. The next image was a close-up of the man in the sweater: he lay on his side on the ground, a large pool of blood spreading out from his head. The following photos showed both men lying in pools of dark blood. Then came photographs of the dead piled in a shallow grave. The bodies were intertwined. Some faces were visible. There were at least 12, all men. Above the grave was a truck, presumably used to transport the bodies, and an excavator ready to cover them with earth.
After the photographs were shown and described, Judge Jorda declared a recess from 11:21 to 11:45.
As the trial continued, Judge Riad requested to speak. Fouad Abdel-Moneim Riad, an Egyptian with a wealth of international legal experience, was 71 years old at the time.
“Perhaps you can help me understand something which appears very bewildering to me. We have here at least ten pictures, and I wondered how they were taken. How can a person who is killing in this way take a photographer with him to picture it? Do you have any interpretation for that?” Judge Riad asked.
At that moment, he was interrupted by the prosecutor Nice, who suggested that the investigator might find it easier to answer this question in a private session. The suggestion was accepted, so the trial transcript does not reveal any possible explanation of how these photographs were taken.
Clearly, the images troubled Judge Riad. A year earlier, on December 1, 1998, he had already tried to uncover who could have taken them and how.
“The people who were executing others, did they act like the Nazis and take photographs of their misdeeds?” he had asked a protected witness, identified only as Witness A.
Witness A didn’t have an answer.
This is the answer to those questions. The story of how these photographs came to be the only ones from the years-long war in the former Yugoslavia that capture the act of execution itself. These are rare images in the history of professional war photography. So far, no such images have emerged from the war in Ukraine.

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Like Judge Riad, I have been haunted for years by the camera’s unsettling proximity to the crime evident in those photographs. We have seen far too many images of the dead in the media, especially from the war in the former Yugoslavia. Yet, no camera has ever captured the precise moment of their death. This is why I am so interested in whose gaze, and what kind of gaze, mediated these sequences of killing for us as viewers. I spoke informally with war photographers and reporters, encountered unreliable information and rumors, and then, three years ago, decided to approach these questions as a journalist, trying to piece together a coherent picture of that event.
Judge Riad wondered if the perpetrators had documented their crimes like the Nazis did, and then the images unintentionally leaked to the public. This would be a logical explanation. The genre of war trophy photographs is almost as old as photography itself. They are typically taken as souvenirs by anonymous photographers, members of one of the warring factions. These photographs serve as evidence of the perpetrator’s power and the enemy’s humiliation. The Third Reich left behind around 1.5 million such images. The war in Yugoslavia left behind a single video recording – the Serbian Scorpions unit executing six Bosniaks in 1995. The execution was filmed by a member of the Scorpions themselves, and the video circulated among unit members for years until it finally surfaced in 2005.
But this execution in Brčko was captured by a professional photographer and published worldwide by Reuters, a major and respected news agency.
How could a photographer capture a murder so close up and in so many frames? Didn’t the killer see the camera? Why did he allow the photographing? Why did he let the photographer keep the film? Professional war photography is an act of non-interference. Does the camera here become a form of participation? Does such close proximity of the camera encourage what is happening? Were Judge Riad’s questions weighing on the minds of the Reuters editors who bought and distributed the photos worldwide? What did war photographers covering Yugoslavia at the time think about them? Did the jury of the World Press Photo award, which honored the photographer in 1993, ask these questions? Was there any doubt among the Dutch media who welcomed the photographer as a journalistic hero when he fled from Belgrade to Amsterdam in 1993?
To truly understand what was photographed and, most importantly, how, we need to retrace the steps: from the photographs back to reality. We need to zoom out from those images. A good photograph can evoke a thousand emotions, but it does not necessarily speak a thousand words.

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The war in Yugoslavia left behind hundreds of thousands of photographs. As the first war in Europe since World War II, it drew a swarm of reporters. For many, it was where their careers began. The war was accessible, inexpensive, and largely without rules for journalists. In conflicts like those in Grenada and Panama, as well as the First Gulf War, many civilians perished, but the media presence was minimal. The American military strictly controlled who could report, as did the British during the Falklands War. The subsequent Second Gulf War introduced the “embedded system” for reporters, meaning they had to receive US military approval to go to Iraq and were then attached to a military unit, reporting what was possible.
In the Yugoslav wars, however, all it took was a car or plane ride to be on the front lines within a few hours.
The war unfolded in front of cameras and lenses, yet this did little to shorten its duration. Five years in Croatia, four in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then another year in Kosovo. Over 2,500 articles, recordings, and photographs from the war in the former Yugoslavia were used as evidence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, according to data from the Media Center in Sarajevo. In many of the tribunal's largest cases, the most crucial evidence came from journalistic materials.
But out of all those images and recordings, these are the only professional photographs directly depicting an execution. Such images are rare in the history of photography. One of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century is the one from Saigon in 1968, where South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan is captured firing a bullet into the head of Viet Cong guerrilla Nguyen Van Lem. It was taken by American photographer Eddie Adams for the Associated Press (AP) and earned him both the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press Photo award. Adams was allowed to take the photograph by the executioner himself, who was convinced of the righteousness of the street execution. The image became famous precisely because it shows what often happens in wars but is rarely depicted. Adams’s photograph sparked protests against the Vietnam War, much to his dismay, as he was a former Marine and supported the American troops fighting for South Vietnam. He considered the executioner a hero for killing a man who had murdered American soldiers.
In 1965, Japanese photographer Keiichi Akimoto captured the police executing a Viet Cong guerrilla at a market in Saigon from a distance.
Associated Press photographers Horst Faas and Michael Laurent won both the Pulitzer Prize and the World Press Photo award in 1971 for their images of a public mass execution by bayonet on the streets of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, during the civil war.
But the circumstances surrounding the creation of these iconic photographs are well documented. After all, they were taken in front of numerous witnesses. The ones in Brčko were not. Two killers, two victims, two photographers. Or was there someone else present?

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The photographs were taken on May 6 or 7 in 1992. The exact date was not established during the trial. They were shot in Brčko, a town of 41,046 residents in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where 55.5% of the population were Bosniaks, then referred to in the media as Muslims, 19.9% were Serbs, 6.9% Croats, and 17.5% from other ethnic groups. The war had only begun in Bosnia a month earlier, and at dawn on April 30, it reached Brčko. At that time of year, daytime temperatures reached 20 degrees Celsius. Workers were looking forward to their summer holidays, children to the end of the school year, and the more daring ones were already jumping into the murky Sava River, which linked the town and Bosnia with Croatia. But that morning, two bridges over the river were destroyed while about a hundred people were on them. The death toll was never determined, as many bodies were swept away by the river.
Goran Jelisić arrived in Brčko that same day, a volunteer from Bijeljina where he lived. At 23, he was a young father, with only a primary school education, working as a tractor driver on an agricultural estate. Three months earlier, he had been released from prison after serving time for check forgery. He had a fondness for money, which was established during the trial. He stole everything he could from detainees – money, watches, jewelry – for which he was also convicted. In Brčko, he was issued a blue Yugoslav police uniform, a silenced Scorpion pistol, and a Motorola radio. His code name was Adolf. Protected witness L during the trial recalled Jelisić’s words: “Hitler was the first Adolf. I am the second.”
The Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) shelled the town and by May 1 had taken control of the post office, hospital, radio and television station, and the police station. Various Serbian units quickly converged on Brčko – there were reportedly as many as 22 different uniforms. Everything was under control, both the approach to the town and the town itself. JNA soldiers were there, as well as members of various Serbian police and paramilitary forces, such as the Tigers and the Red Berets. They were ruthless. A month earlier in Bijeljina, they had swiftly killed non-Serb civilians and, with practically no resistance, taken over this predominantly Bosniak town.
A similar fate was intended for Brčko. Bosniak and Croatian men between the ages of 16 and 60 were detained in makeshift detention centers. Some were taken to the Secretariat of Internal Affairs (SUP), as the police station in the center of town on what was then Marshal Tito Square was officially called. About 20 detainees were crammed into a dark room numbered 13. The group constantly changed. Some were taken elsewhere, some were released, some were killed.
It was from this “room 13”, as it was referred to, that Goran Jelisić led out the man in the brown jacket. Why him, specifically, remains unknown. Perhaps he was the first one near the door when it opened, perhaps he wore a valuable watch, or perhaps someone simply didn’t like him. Jelisić couldn’t recall how many times he shot the man, though he said it was his first killing. A baptism of fire, as he put it during the trial.
“Maybe two or three bullets,” he said.
He established a pattern of killing: his other victims were also executed with a silenced Scorpion pistol from close range and from behind. Those who knew Jelisić said he was a coward, unable to look his victims in the eye. He would usually shoot them in the back of the head. This was confirmed during the Hague trial. Later, there would be less blood than in those photographs: Jelisić would instruct his victims to bend their heads over a manhole so their blood would drain away, minimizing the cleanup after the execution.
Jelisić was convicted of murdering 13 people. How many he killed in total during the mere three weeks he spent in Brčko in May 1992 remains unknown. The exact number was not established at trial. Since he confessed to the murders he was charged with, the prosecution did not pursue further victims. According to protected witness L, Jelisić claimed that he needed to execute 20 to 30 people every morning to be able to have his coffee. Another witness said that as early as May 8, he was boasting that he had killed 68 people, and by May 11, he claimed to have killed 150. Witness A said he vividly remembered Jelisić’s voice because he heard him 10 to 15 times a day ordering: “Lie down and put your head above the manhole!”
Former detainees who testified at the trial recounted seeing him kill and described how he would ask them to stack the bodies in a pile so they could be taken away in a meat transport truck from the Bimeks company to the mass grave. This is the mass grave seen in the photographs. Some witnesses stated that bodies were also taken to the Farma animal feed factory, where they were processed into animal meal.
Witness N estimated that he saw around a hundred bodies stacked like firewood, “piled up like logs ready for the furnace.” The prosecution estimated that Jelisić could have killed around a hundred people, maybe even more.
The war in Bosnia lasted long and produced many killers. Pre-war teachers, policemen, and farmers became war criminals. But few, like Jelisić, killed so prolifically and individually, person by person. And these were unarmed, defenseless people. That is why he received the longest sentence the ICTY had handed down at the time: 40 years in prison.
In his defense, some of his pre-war acquaintances testified, describing him as a quiet, polite young man who didn’t distinguish between Serbs and Bosniaks. Some Bosniaks even testified that he had helped them during the war.
The witness who testified at The Hague, saying he would never forget Jelisić’s face, described him as someone who could have been anyone: “A young man in his twenties, brownish hair, medium height, medium build, rather lively.”
Wars often leave behind gaps in factual records, even when exhaustive trials have been conducted, like those for the crimes in Brčko. Unidentified victims. Unknown perpetrators. Uncertain dates. Unresolved questions of command responsibility. Unclear circumstances of the crimes. Even disagreements about when the war began and when it ended. Thus, the total number of victims in Brčko remains unknown. According to available data, 472 people were identified as having been killed in the period from May to July, the time during which the largest camp, Luka, was in operation. Situated in the largest pre-war river port in Bosnia, Luka had plenty of warehouses to hold prisoners, and it was conveniently located near the Sava, into which the bodies of the murdered could be dumped. Jelisić managed the camp for some time – or at least that’s how he presented himself. The court never established what his formal position was. The victims were unarmed, forcibly detained, and there was no fighting. It is estimated that the total number of those killed and missing in Brčko ranges from between 2,000 and 3,000 people, accounting for 5-7% of the town’s population – at least one in 20 residents of Brčko.

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Bojan Stojanović was a 22-year-old photographer from Belgrade at the time, working for the daily newspaper Večernje novosti (Evening News). He photographed everything, from sports events to market offerings. Večernje novosti was and still is a tabloid, often referred to as the “Venereal Diseases” in journalistic circles. In 1994, they published Uroš Predić’s realistic painting “Orphan at Mother’s Grave” from 1888, presenting it as a recent photograph of a Serbian boy in Bosnia and Herzegovina mourning his family killed by Muslims. Večernje novosti was also the mouthpiece of Slobodan Milošević and, in 2000, it featured a photograph on its front page from one of Milošević’s campaign rallies, artificially inflating the number of his supporters. Media manipulation was not uncommon during the wars in Yugoslavia.
In early May 1992, Stojanović and his friend and colleague from Večernje novosti, Srđan Petrović, were on assignment for Reuters, heading to Sarajevo, but they sent the execution photographs from Brčko to Belgrade. Both occasionally worked with Reuters.
At that time, Emil Vaš was a Reuters photographer in Belgrade and the first to receive the photographs from Brčko. “When I saw them, I couldn’t believe it. 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,” he told in an interview over the phone.
Jura Nanuk, a Reuters photographer from Croatia, was also at the Reuters office in Belgrade at the time and recalls Vaš being beside himself: “It wasn’t as shocking to me because I’d already seen so much during the war in Croatia.”
Once, he recounts, he was sitting with Croatian soldiers when one of them asked, “Do you want to see the head of a dead Chetnik? I’m keeping it in schnapps.” He says his stomach turned. The soldier offered to let him photograph the head, but Nanuk didn’t want to see it, let alone photograph it. Croatian soldiers would sometimes ask him if he wanted them to fire the howitzer, since the photo would be more dramatic with flames and smoke, but he says he always refused because he knew the shell would land somewhere and could kill someone. “If it’s fired in the heat of battle, I’ll take the picture, but doing it just for the photograph is out of the question.” They even offered to let him shoot a gun, but he never touched a weapon.

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Petar Kujundžić, then the Reuters chief photographer in Belgrade, worked for the agency in various parts of the world until 2015. He received information about the photographs that night. When he saw them, his first thought was that they were staged. He asked Stojanović and Petrović how they had taken them. They replied that they were just passing by, ran into some people, and then it happened. “I was suspicious because I knew no one in their right mind would allow such a thing to be photographed. It’s not like with protests: you get out of the car, take pictures, and move on. The guy holding the gun would have, at some point, said to the photographer, ‘Do you want me to kill you too?’” Kujundžić said. He didn’t have any experience where such situations had happened by chance, nor did any of the war photographers he knew, who, like him, had spent years reporting from conflict zones. He remembers many photographs of that event, certainly two rolls of film, he says. He also saw Petrović’s film and recalls that the photos were similar.
Kujundžić took the photographs to Donald Forbes, who was the Reuters bureau chief for Yugoslavia in 1992, coordinating war reporting from the office in Belgrade. In written communication, Forbes noted that there was very close cooperation between Serbian journalists and the police and army, and he doubted that a Western photographer would have been allowed to witness such an execution. However, he didn’t delve into how the photographs were taken, stating generally that photographs were accepted based on trust. “There was no question of the bureau not submitting them to London since they constituted legitimate material for reporting,” Forbes said. He remembered Stojanović as “a good photographer but a loose cannon”. “At some point he acquired a white Golf stolen from the VW factory in Bosnia and got himself and the Sarajevo Reuters office in trouble with the UN by putting UN stickers on the side of it,” he recounted. About publishing the photos, Forbes initially said that he would certainly have been involved in the decision to use them, but later added that the decision to publish the images was made by the Reuters editorial team in London and that it was up to them to assess the ethics of those images.
At the time, Pat Benic was Reuters’ Photo Editor in London, responsible for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. When asked if there were any doubts in London regarding those 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.” However, he did not clarify how the information was verified.
Viktoria Teisenhoffer, Reuters’ Senior Media Account Manager for Central and South East Europe, promptly responded to our initial general inquiry, offering assistance. But when we specified what we were interested in – who decided to publish the photographs and whether there were any doubts at the time – we received no further response, despite multiple follow-ups over the course of a year.
The photographs were released with the tag “Yugoslavia out”, meaning they were not distributed to Reuters clients in the former Yugoslavia, but from May 9 onwards, they were published worldwide, credited only with the names in variations such as Bojan Srdjan/Reuters and Srdjan Bojan/Reuters. Kujundžić says the photographers requested to be credited together. They had been in Brčko together, photographed together, sold the photographs together, and decided to sign them together. The photos were released with slight variations in their descriptions: “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.”

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Stojanović and Petrović continued to travel to war zones and take photographs. Stojanović submitted one of the Brčko photos for the World Press Photo competition – the one where the victim is still standing, with the executioner aiming a Scorpion pistol at his head. World Press Photo is a prestigious global award for photojournalism, presented annually since 1955 by an independent organization based in Amsterdam. In February 1993, it was announced that Stojanović had won the award in the Spot News category. That same month, he left Serbia for the Netherlands. He has never returned to his homeland in over 30 years.
In the Netherlands, Stojanović sought political asylum. He emphasized that he was not a war refugee, but was being persecuted by the authorities in Serbia and that his life was in danger. He was welcomed as a photographic dissident, judging by the media archive of interviews he gave to Dutch media at the time, mostly in March 1993. On public television, he was compared to Salman Rushdie. In interviews, he explained how the photographs came about. The versions differ slightly, but he always said that he managed to take the photographs unnoticed and then leave unnoticed. In the Dutch newspaper De Stem on March 30, 1993, he explained that on May 6, 1992 he was driving with a friend from Belgrade to Sarajevo when he heard shots. Stojanović parked the car, grabbed his Nikon, and walked into a small street littered with corpses. In front of him, two Serbian soldiers were walking with two unarmed Muslims. A moment later, one of the soldiers, in cold blood, raised his arm and shot the Bosnian man in front of him in the head. Stojanović did not hesitate for a moment and kept his finger continuously on the shutter button. He had no time to focus his 35-mm lens. Before the soldier realized he was being photographed, Stojanović ran away.
In interviews, he said that after the publication of the photographs that depicted Serbian forces as murderers, a bomb was thrown at the building where he lived with his parents in Belgrade. In some interviews, Stojanović said it happened twice; in one, he said it happened three times. He also claimed that a Kalashnikov was emptied from a car at his building and that he received hundreds of threatening phone calls. 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. My search warrant notice was shown on Serbian television and appeared in the newspapers.” In November 1992 he was arrested on suspicion of attempting to murder a woman he didn’t even know, he claimed. In another interview, he said he was arrested for “alleged robbery”. He stated that while in custody, he was interrogated about the photographs and accused of espionage. After being released from detention two months later, he discovered, as he claimed at the time, that all his photographic equipment, 4,000 negatives, and documents had been taken from his apartment. That was when he decided to flee, but since he had no passport, he allegedly crossed the border with Bulgaria illegally, riding on the roof of a train. In several interviews, he mentioned that Reuters had helped him escape.
In response to our inquiry, the relevant Second Municipal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade reviewed the records for 1992 and 1993 but found no information about attacks on anyone called Bojan Stojanović. None of the people we spoke to – journalists and photographers who were close to him – knew anything about bombs being thrown at his building. Such events are memorable, especially since there was no fighting in Belgrade and bombs were not an everyday occurrence. The Reuters chief in Belgrade, Donald Forbes, also does not remember a warrant being issued for him on television. “I doubt Serbian TV would have shown photographs of him without my knowing about it. Our staff monitored the news broadcasts,” he said.
Forbes and Pat Benic both deny that Reuters helped him 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 stated.
In April 1993, Dutch media reported that two Serbs had kidnapped and attempted to kill Stojanović in Amsterdam. According to NRC Handelsblad on April 21, 1993: “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.”
In 1993, Dutch public broadcaster VPRO produced and aired a half-hour documentary about Stojanović titled De prijs (“The Price”). Stojanović, tall and slim, with thick, dark wavy hair, large brown eyes, and full lips, fit the description given by his Reuters colleague, photojournalist Nino Šolić: “handsome as sin.” As he ate a salad, breaking toast and chewing loudly, Bojan showed photos from the war – wounded soldiers, the bodies of civilians. Of the award-winning photograph from Brčko, he said: “This guy is a Muslim. Why he died, I don’t know. I was just there, and it all happened in a moment.” He repeated that the killers hadn’t paid any attention to him, even though, he claimed, he was just three meters behind Jelisić’s back.
The documentary shows Stojanović at the World Press Photo exhibition, observing his enlarged winning photograph with a caption as it had in the media. He tells a man, presumably part of the exhibition organization, “Actually, this man wasn’t a sniper; he was just a civilian.” The man nods and says, “Yeah.” He doesn’t seem surprised to learn that the exhibited image perpetuates a lie about the murdered man. Stojanović continues, “The guy from Reuters put it [caption] there because maybe he was afraid. But it doesn’t matter.” The man listens and then asks Stojanović if he wants some coffee.
I spoke to the film’s co-director, Thomas Doebele. He told me that they did not verify Stojanović’s statements with the Reuters office in Belgrade, nor did they do any fact-checking or verification. The film crew assumed that Stojanović was a legitimate photographer and that his work was credible, as he had won the prestigious World Press Photo award. Doebele couldn’t remember who the man was to whom Stojanović said the victim wasn’t a sniper. Neither did anyone at the World Press Photo Foundation.
For years, the caption accompanying that photograph on the World Press Photo website read: “Ruthless killing in the streets in early summer. Accused of firing on a Serbian refugee convoy, a Muslim civilian is captured by a uniformed Serbian policeman and shot in the back of the head.”
After I sent the documentary footage to World Press Photo, they changed the caption on their website – 30 years after it had already been mentioned on Dutch public television during the exhibition preparation. World Press Photo said that back in 1993, their research team consulted various sources to verify the information for the winning photographs, but they didn’t specify which sources they contacted or provide the names of the team members, preventing me from verifying the vetting process. Repeated requests for an interview with the foundation’s director to present the information I had gathered were persistently declined by their press office until they eventually stopped responding altogether.
At least now, next to the photograph and its former caption on their website, there is this note: “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.”
Verifying Stojanović’s statements in the Dutch media revealed that he was indeed in detention in Belgrade at the end of 1992. His colleague Srđan Petrović was also detained. But not due to false accusations or a fabricated case, but because they, along with Petar Vujanić, who was a photographer at the time and still is, and whom I spoke to, and Dejan Veličković, robbed an elderly woman in Belgrade. They were tried and convicted. The Higher Court in Belgrade confirmed that Veličković was sentenced to one year in prison, which he served. Vujanić received a year and two months, which he also served. Petrović got a year and two months as well, while Stojanović received the longest sentence – a year and four months.
Photographer Kamenko Pajić told me that he was present when Stojanović confessed to Reuters’ Belgrade chief, Donald Forbes, that he had robbed “a grandma” and didn’t want to go to prison. He didn’t go to prison and didn’t serve his sentence. He couldn’t have. He fled Serbia and never returned.
Vujanić describes Stojanović and Petrović as “dedicated war photographers who chased after the perfect shot.” What bothers him about those photographs from Brčko is the bad publicity they brought to Serbia, which he suspects our investigation will replicate. Because the stories about the war, he said, are always framed through nationality. I responded that it isn’t about whether the photographers were Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, Russian, giraffes, or Martians, but about the role of journalists in war and the ethical boundaries that should not be crossed, because otherwise, we become propagandists, participants, and perhaps even perpetrators.
Vujanić also never heard that Stojanović was persecuted or that bombs were thrown at his residence.
Stojanović, it appears, had a flexible understanding of the role of a journalist in war. Nikola Šolić, then a Reuters photographer in Croatia, remembers Stojanović as being handsome, tall, and entertaining, but also as someone who needed rescuing from detention when, at the beginning of the war in Croatia he was arrested by Croatian forces because he was in a truck with Serbian units and wearing a uniform. He wasn’t a soldier, but a photographer, though he was wearing a uniform even at the Večernje novosti office. This was confirmed by other photographers as well.
Imre Szabo, a Serbian photographer who worked for many foreign media outlets during the war, remembers encountering Stojanović and Petrović on the Banija front at the beginning of the war in Croatia in 1991. “They were bragging about how great it was. ‘What’s so great?’ we asked, and they said, ‘We were shooting.’ ‘What were you shooting with?’ we asked. ‘With automatic rifles,’ they said. ‘Who were you shooting at?’ we asked. They said, ‘At Croats’,” Szabo recounted. He then told them, “Guys, you’re photographers, you should only be pointing your lenses.” Szabo said that they were full of “youthful enthusiasm, adrenaline, and a desire to prove themselves.”
Miloš Cvetković, another Serbian photographer who published in many prestigious magazines during the war and was a stringer for Reuters, refused to speak but he gave an interview to photographer Sandra Vitaljić, which was published in her book War of Images: Contemporary War Photography in 2013. In the interview, he related how Stojanović and Petrović had shot up their own car near Sarajevo to gain importance when they returned to Belgrade. Regarding the photographs from Brčko, he said: “The first thing you look at when analyzing that photo is the lens used.”
It was shot with a wide-angle lens. This isn’t just a technical detail, but can also be an interpretative tool. The camera’s close position suggests that the photographer may not have been merely an observer. “You’re automatically an accomplice, if not an instigator,” Cvetković believes.
“It’s clear from the photographs that it was a staged image,” said photographer Kamenko Pajić in a phone call from Washington, where he now lives. During the war, he photographed for Reuters, the New York Times, and SIPA Press. He said that in 1992 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was offered the chance to witness a murder for the sake of a photograph, but he refused. Cvetković also said that he was once offered the opportunity to photograph a Muslim being killed in Bosnia, but he too declined.
“There were people like that in Bosnia, but it was a matter of which reporters they would encounter,” said Pajić.
Reporters, especially young and local ones without prior war reporting experience, were unprepared when they faced extreme situations. While, like their peers around the world, they were listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind album, which had just come out, war broke out and confronted them with severed heads. When the war started, Jura Nanuk was 23 and said he knew nothing, like many other reporters. Reuters gave him basic guidelines, such as what information to include in captions, but no instructions or training on journalistic ethics, for example. “It was left to each of our own consciences,” he said.

XXX

Stephen Mayes was the head of the jury for the 1993 World Press Photo awards when Stojanović was honored. Mayes regularly writes and speaks about the ethics and realities of photographic practice, and was very open to discussing my research. He remembers the photograph, but not any discussion among the jury members regarding it. He acknowledges that the question can be asked: Did the photograph happen because the photographer was there? Or, would the scene have occurred if the photographer had not been present?
That year, a total of 1,969 photographers from 84 countries competed for awards with 19,428 pictures, according to information provided by the World Press Photo Foundation.
In the Spot News category, in which Stojanović was awarded, anything could be included – from celebrity weddings to political elections worldwide. 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 explained. There was no information about the photographs or their authors. 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. “It’s ‘noise’ from a crowd of photos, and those that break through that noise usually have some instant drama,” Mayes said.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the World Press Photo award, Thames and Hudson published the book This Critical Mirror, edited by Mayes. In it, he compared Stojanović’s award-winning photograph with Eddie Adams’s iconic image from Vietnam.
“It has been said that Eddie Adams’s picture of the execution on a Saigon street forced nations to reconsider the purpose of the war in Vietnam. And yet the same circumstance is caught on film twenty-five years later in Bosnia, and the world shrugs its shoulders to say ‘Who cares?’ The difference does not lie in the event or the photograph, but in our perception of its significance,” Mayes wrote. The Balkan tribal war, as the West often perceived the conflict in the former Yugoslavia to be, certainly did not captivate the world like a war in which Americans participated and died. In that sense, Mayes was right. But the difference between those two photographs also lies in the fact that we know the circumstances of Adams’s image in great detail.
Over the past decade, concerns about the credibility of documentary images have periodically erupted, with debates about the manipulation and post-processing of digitally produced photographs – even when the changes had a minimal impact on the image’s meaning. In 2009, World Press Photo revised its rules to clarify that photographs in the contest could not be altered except in accordance with accepted industry standards. For example, World Press Photo disqualified Stepan Rudik in 2010 for digitally removing part of a foot belonging to a person seen in the background of one of the images he had entered. That year, for the first time, photographers were required to submit raw image files if judges suspected that photographs were manipulated beyond what the rules allowed. In 2015, Italian photographer Giovanni Troilo was stripped of his World Press Photo award after an investigation found that he had misrepresented the location where one of the pictures was taken. But there were no discussions about the circumstances under which photographs were taken or the role of the photographer.
Only in 2015 did World Press Photo introduce a code of ethics, stating, among other things, that photographers must ensure captions are accurate and must be open and transparent about the entire process through which their pictures are made.

XXX

Halfway through my research, I received a confidential excerpt from the interrogation of Goran Jelisić conducted by Hague investigators Bernard O'Donnell and Paul Basham in 1998 at the ICTY. This document is not public, but at Jelisić’s trial the prosecutor Nice cited this part of Jelisić’s interrogation, although the names Jelisić mentioned were redacted in the trial transcripts.
Here is an excerpt from the record I obtained:
“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 you trust a mass murderer? John Ralston, the chief investigator for 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 – 25 prosecution witnesses testified against him at The Hague.
Ralston and investigator Bernard O'Donnell, whom I also spoke with, are bound by confidentiality regarding information from their time at ICTY, so they couldn’t say much. To that, the prosecution was only interested in the photographs as evidence against Jelisić.

XXX

I went to Brčko and spoke with several people who remember the situation in May 1992. Back then, there were checkpoints at the entrance to Brčko. You couldn’t just enter or leave the town. The town was empty. Those who could had left, and those who stayed didn’t dare go outside. People were being systematically executed in the streets. Armed men with balaclavas on their heads would line up civilians facing the wall and shoot them in the back. Members of paramilitary forces looted empty apartments. The police station building from which Jelisić took his victim is in the very center of town, on the main pedestrian walkway, as is the nearby alleyway at the entrance to the Brčko craft center, where Jelisić carried out the killing. Jelisić didn’t bother to discreetly execute the murder. Under normal circumstances – before that May 1992, as well as today – such a killing would have happened just meters away from people sitting in cafes. Two young men with cameras would not have gone unnoticed in the center of Brčko, even today, let alone in a deserted town controlled by uniformed men. Jelisić had to have seen the photographers behind him, following his every step and snapping away 72 times, the minimum number needed to fill two rolls of film – one for Stojanović and one for Petrović.
Midhat Bećirević, a long-time war crimes investigator from Brčko, interviewed Jelisić for five days in Padua in November 2010, when Jelisić was serving his sentence in Italy. He said it was exhausting, but that if he had to assess, he would believe 70% of what Jelisić said, especially the events he described in detail and those for which he had already been convicted. Bećirević is convinced that the photographing was prearranged. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been granted access to such scenes. If it hadn’t been arranged, the moment he took the photo, Jelisić would have killed him,” he said.
To show me that even the location of mass graves wasn’t discovered by chance, he took me there. It’s in an industrial zone, about 10 minutes by car from Brčko, like a blind alley known only to those who know why they are going there. Near the mass graves that Stojanović photographed, there were buildings of the duty-free zone that housed the base of the Red Berets and other units. The whole area was guarded by the army and paramilitary forces. “There’s no way you could have stumbled upon that place by accident, let alone photographed it unnoticed,” Midhat insisted.
Isak Gaši was a detainee at the Luka camp in Brčko from May 27 to June 7, 1992. His wife, who had taken refuge with friends in Belgrade, managed to secure his release from the camp. He was rescued by Rade Božić, one of the commanders of the Red Berets. Later, Gaši testified in six trials at The Hague, including against Slobodan Milošević. In several conversations we had between Croatia and the US, where Gaši has lived for over 20 years, he told me that in the summer of 1992 in Zemun, Serbia, near the “Zlatno Veslo” restaurant, he met Rade Božić, who introduced him to what he called “a friend”. That friend was Bojan Stojanović. They didn’t talk for long, but Božić told to Gaši that he had brought Stojanović into Brčko. He also said that he had ordered the demolition of the bridges in Brčko. Gaši also testified about this at The Hague in 2004. It is estimated that between 70 and 100 people died in the explosion. No one has been held accountable for this. Today, Rade Božić is Monk Nikolaj at a Serbian Orthodox monastery in Kosovo. I contacted him and sent him several messages. After a few months, he finally responded. He wrote that “none of what Isak said is true” and that he knows nothing about the photographing of the killing by Jelisić.

XXX

The murdered man in the brown leather jacket did not have a name at the trial in The Hague. He was recorded as an unidentified victim. Actually, his name was Husein Kršo. When he was killed, he was 34 years and five months old. He was a Brčko waiter who had opened his own cafe after years of waiting tables. Many knew him, and many loved him, as is often the case with good waiters. He wasn’t a member of any party, any organization, or any army. Kršo 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. The brown suede leather jacket had been given to him by his brother from Switzerland, his middle son, Mustafa Kršo, told me. We met in Brčko. He said his mother couldn’t talk about it, so he came instead. The wife and sons saw Kršo for the last time a few days before he was killed, when, in early May 1992, the whole family wanted to leave the town. The Yugoslav People’s Army separated the men from the women and children. The men were not allowed to leave. Mustafa remembers saying goodbye to his father near the military garrison. Everyone was crying. His father gave his mother some money and said, “Don’t worry about anything.”
They didn’t discover what had happened to Husein until 1993, when his eldest son, ten-year-old Nedžad, was watching TV and screamed, “Mom, there’s dad!” Dad’s stance, Dad’s jacket, Dad’s shirt, Dad’s moccasins. There was no doubt. “The first information about Dad’s fate came to us through Bojan Stojanović’s photograph,” Mustafa says. The murder of their father was shown on television. It wasn’t until 2007 that Kršo’s remains were found in a mass grave. He had first been buried in the mass grave that Stojanović photographed near Brčko, and then his body, along with others, had been moved to another grave in an attempt to cover up the mass crime. Mustafa says that in the summer of 2003, when they finally returned to Brčko after 11 years in exile, the town reeked unbearably of decay, “like when a dog dies.”
“Maybe they were moving the bodies then,” he said.
Kršo’s wife identified him by his clothes. Many didn’t need a DNA analysis to recognize their loved ones, even when nothing remained of them but bones – often only parts, as they had been moved from primary graves and the bones had become mixed and lost. Sometimes only ribs and a femur were found, or a pelvis and a collarbone. But they remembered well the clothing and shoes that their loved ones wore.
“Even when you see your father’s death in photographs, there remains a glimmer of hope that he is alive and just doesn’t know where we are, so he can’t contact us. Only with the remains was that hope finally extinguished,” said Mustafa.
His father had been friends with the man in the beige sweater who was killed alongside him and is seen with him in the photographs. Hajrudin Muzurović. He was 39 years old. Skilled parquet installer. He had planned to marry in May 1992, the month he was killed. An ordinary civilian, like Kršo. They were exhumed from the same mass grave and buried with dignity on the same day at the Brčko city cemetery. Fifteen years after their deaths. The man in the camouflage uniform who killed him was Enver Stravički, known as “Shock”. He was a volunteer from Serbia. He is no longer alive.
Mustafa didn’t know anything more about his father’s death than what was reported in the media. But he wonders: Was his father killed because the photographer was there? Maybe he would have been killed anyway on another day, or maybe never. Some were released from the police station. Many were taken to the Luka camp. Some escaped from the camp. Many were tortured and then killed. He would prefer to think his father wasn’t tortured, that he was killed quickly.
“If the photographer paid for the murder, he’s the same as Jelisić to me,” Mustafa said.
The story that Stojanović and Petrović paid Jelisić for the murder has been circulating in Belgrade’s photographic circles for a long time. It originated from Srđan Ilić, a photographer who worked for the Associated Press during the war. I called him 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 war anymore. I told him that I would then use the written source where he claimed that the photographers paid Jelisić and asked if he still stood by it. He said to leave him out of the text entirely if possible, and if not, to use that written source. In Sandra Vitaljić’s 2013 book War of Images: Contemporary War Photography, Ilić says: “Those two would come to me at AP, asking to borrow a car, to write some accreditation, a permit, give them advance money, and equipment for developing and sending pictures because they were going to bring ‘phenomenal images’ that hadn’t been seen before. Of course, I didn’t give them anything because it all seemed very unprofessional. After that, Bojan 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 German marks to kill those few Muslims.”
Every photographer I spoke to knew about that story, but no one else heard directly from Stojanović and Petrović that they had paid Jelisić for the murder. Only Ilić.
Jelisić was greedy. He was convicted of financial fraud before the war and convicted of theft during the war. Serbian journalist Gordana Igrić wrote in the newspaper Bosanska pošta in 1998 that Jelisić “was on the lookout for foreign journalists from whom he tried to charge for his statements. We learned that he started with a sum of 6,000 marks but would end up admitting that even 200 marks would be enough.” At his trial, Jelisić admitted that he left Brčko with 6,000 or 7,000 marks and spent them in two or three months. At that time, the average monthly salary was around 100 marks.
Back in 2015, Sarajevo photographer Ziyah Gafić wrote an email to the World Press Photo Foundation after Sandra Vitaljić’s book was published, raising suspicions that Stojanović had staged the photograph and paid the killer. “It may as well be the most blatant and horrific example of manipulation and staging in recent history,” Gafić wrote in the email that he forwarded to me. He never received a response.

XXX

Bojan Stojanović is deeply disturbed by the accusation that he and Srđan Petrović paid for the photographs.
I tracked him down months after I was told he was no longer alive. He’s quite alive and has been living in Spain for the last decade. He moved there from the Netherlands because of his partner. He had dabbled in photography a little while in the Netherlands, but said he “was no longer interested in taking photos, but in selling them”, so he had a digital platform for selling photos. Based on collected information, he did all sorts of work – buying internet domains, reselling computer parts, and in Spain, he runs Marbella Television, something like a streaming platform on which he airs uninteresting videos of himself and his partner having fun. He was very talkative over the phone. He wanted us to “get to know each other first” and see if I “use my brain”. He asked whether I was married. Did I have children? Did I have a lover? He was interested in which of the photographers I spoke to had the best sense of humor. He said they were all “as boring as hedgehogs”. At the mention of Srđan Ilić, he immediately got angry. He said Ilić made up the story about the payment because he was jealous. “It’s such a naïve stupidity that I can’t believe people accepted it,” he said. He also mentioned the possibility of suing him for defamation.
Regarding the circumstances of photographing the murder, he spoke differently than he did to Dutch media when he won the award. Now he said they couldn’t have entered that part of Brčko if they hadn’t worked for the Serbian paper Večernje novosti because all “foreign journalists were enemies of Serbia”. He said Jelisić knew he was being photographed. In fact, he spoke with him briefly after the murder. He and Petrović knew people would be killed. “They told us they would kill people because they were snipers. How can I know if that’s true or not?” He didn’t specify who told them that. “Some locals,” he said. To Dutch television back in 1993, he said the victim wasn’t a sniper. I told him that Jelisić had also told Hague investigators that it was a staged shooting meant to depict alleged Serbian victims. He laughed and said that 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. He said that Reuters still has one original of his film, while the other was confiscated by Serbian intelligence. However, Reuters doesn’t have any photographs by Bojan Stojanović in its digital archive, as a photographer who works for them confirmed to me.
So why did Jelisić allow himself to be photographed while killing a man?
“Because he was proud to defend the Serbian ideology. It was done by a Serb who was crazy,” Stojanović replied.
“Why didn’t anyone else allow it during the whole war?” I asked.
“How should I know? Probably they were smarter than Jelisić.”
“Of all the war criminals, Jelisić is the dumbest?”
“You said that.”
The next day, he sent me a message claiming that I had spoken to a “ChatGPT AI Voice Clone” the day before and that he had used me for his experiment. He didn’t insist on it, as if he didn’t expect me to believe it. He didn’t retract anything he had said. He sent me many messages, including one saying he wanted to warn me that contacting him would change my life. He called me, even in the middle of the night, but I didn’t answer. Six months after our first conversation, he was still sending me messages.
Srđan Petrović also fled to the Netherlands. Like Stojanović, he was granted political asylum and lived there for a long time. But he eventually returned to Serbia. Petrović has since built a good career. He is a private jet pilot. He hasn’t given up photography and now shoots Formula 1. I called him to meet in September 2023 when I was in Belgrade. He couldn’t make it, but he was willing to talk 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 there. In the center, they saw two men leading two others somewhere. He asked the one in the police uniform – he would later find out it was Jelisić – where they were taking them. “He said, ‘We’re taking them to a wedding,’ and grinned,” Petrović recalled. He said Jelisić then added about the man he was about to kill, “This is my 180-something; let me make it 200 and go home.” They were two meters away from him, Petrović said. The wide-angle lens confirms it. When the shooting started, Stojanović and Petrović were already photographing. He said they were shocked. Petrović’s photograph of Hajrudin Muzurović’s murder appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Petrović said the killers ignored them, which was normal because “they knew we were ethnic Serbs; a Romanian or a Swede wouldn’t have been able to get there.”
“You know how journalists go to war? They sit ten kilometers away from the battles, get drunk, and make up stories. 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,” he said.
Two Dutch psychiatrists assessed Jelisić for his trial. They didn’t mention any reduced intellectual capacity or mental illness, but they did note his antisocial and narcissistic tendencies. This wasn’t considered a mitigating factor.
While in ICTY custody, Jelisić socialized with Bosnian detainee Esad Landžo, later convicted of war crimes against Serbs. When we met two years ago in Bosnia, Esad told me that once Jelisić got angry because he didn’t receive some documents from the police in Brčko that could have helped his case. He started ranting and cursing, saying, among other things, that “a journalist paid him to film that murder.” Landžo said he “remembers that one hundred percent”, but doesn’t know the details – whether the money was given to film the murder or to kill and then film it?

XXX

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 received rejections from both the prison and the Italian Ministry of Justice. The last one came in November 2022, stating that it was not advisable for Jelisić to meet with anyone interested in his past. Meanwhile, I was also sending letters to Jelisić. I didn’t receive any response. At the end of 2022, he was transferred back to The Hague while awaiting a decision on which country would accept him to continue serving his sentence. Very soon after he arrived in The Hague, he contacted me. He couldn’t reach out from Italy. But even in The Hague, I wasn’t allowed to visit him. He was transferred to Belgium, where he has a phone in his cell, and he called me often during April 2023. He was polite, open to questions, and hopeful that he would be granted early release within a year, although his request had already been denied twice. He repeated to me what he had told The Hague investigators, though I can’t quote him because we didn’t agree on what I could use before he stopped calling me. However, he claimed that the photographing of the murder in Brčko was arranged as propaganda. It was on May 6, he remembers because the Luka camp opened the next day. 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 as if Muslims were killing Serbs. Veselić was later killed. Ristanić was acquitted of war crimes charges in a first-instance verdict in Bosnia in 2022. He refuses to speak to journalists.
Jelisić mentioned that there was also a girl there who had been hired to lament over the supposed Serbian 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, who was in the Red Berets.
Violeta was also mentioned during Jelisić’s trial in The Hague. “I just remember she was carrying a camera and standing next to him. Then she said, ‘Goran, is this your 53rd or 54th?’” a protected witness recalled, adding that Violeta accompanied the question with a hand gesture mimicking the pulling of a gun trigger.
Violeta’s boyfriend was killed that same year. Her mother came to Brčko to take her home. In June 2023, I found the mother on the porch of the house she lives in, in the village of Međaši near Bijeljina. Slobodanka Zarić, known as Seka, is 69 years old today. She welcomed me because I came with her acquaintance, lawyer Duško Tomić, who lives in the same village and has been dealing with war crimes for decades. She told me she wasn’t in Brčko in May 1992. I read her Jelisić’s statement. She said she had never seen Jelisić in person. I showed her the photographs of the murder. She shook her head, saying she was seeing them for the first time. Both Tomić and I believed her. That night I traveled back to Zagreb.
Early the next morning, she went to Tomić’s house and told him that she actually had been in Brčko at that time and that it was indeed as I had described. Her daughter, Violeta, had been hired to mourn the supposed Serbian victims.

Violeta did not respond to phone calls.

Additional reporting by Ruben Brugnera and Natalija Jovanović. The investigation was supported by Journalismfund