THE last photos of murdered British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, who disappeared a year ago in the Amazon rainforest, have been found on a cell phone recovered in the jungle.

The pictures, shown in a documentary about the men’s lives and work that premiered yesterday, were taken in the hours before Phillips and Pereira were killed on June 5 last year – a crime that triggered international outcry and drew attention to the lawlessness fuelling the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforest.

Investigators said Phillips, 57, and Pereira, 41, were shot by a group of illegal fishermen in what appeared to be retaliation for Pereira’s work fighting environmental crimes in the far-flung Javari Valley Indigenous reservation, in northern Brazil.

The pictures were recovered by an Indigenous patrol team that Pereira had trained to protect the reservation from illegal gold miners, loggers and poachers.

The patrol from Indigenous-rights group UNIVAJA, which played a crucial role in helping the authorities find the men’s remains, continued searching for clues in the region in the months after the double murder.

The documentary, produced by streaming service Globoplay, shows the search team using a metal detector to sweep the area where the remains were found, which had been covered in water during the rainy season.

Working painstakingly in the muck, they managed to dig up Phillips’s notebooks and press card, then found Pereira’s phone – potentially a key piece of evidence.

The mud-encrusted phone, recovered in October, was given to forensics experts to extract the images and data.

The last picture, taken the morning the men were killed, shows Phillips sitting in a small boat on the Itaquai river, one of the brown waterways that snake across the region, speaking with a local resident near shore.

There are also videos of one of the three suspects currently on trial in the case, local fisherman Amarildo “Pelado” Costa de Oliveira, crossing paths with Phillips and Pereira as he traveled down the river.

Indigenous patrol members said Oliveira had threatened them a day before the killing. Pereira had received repeated death threats for his work.

UNIVAJA leaders said they hoped the images would help bring justice in the case. – AFP, June 3, 2023.