Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes:

It’s a brief window into a doomed soul. Clinging to his mother’s back, the child looks twice into the camera held by the man about to kill him. The natural curiosity of a child that fear has failed to extinguish. The smartphone captures the casual cruelty with which both mother and child are killed. Nearby, another mother and daughter are executed. One killer continues to pump bullets into the lifeless bodies with a glee that seems excessive even to his accomplices. “That’s enough, Tsanga!” one shouts. “That’s enough.”

In July 2018, when the video of the killings started circulating on social media, it was clear what had happened. The mothers and children were defenseless, they weren’t resisting, and they were killed with intent. Other facts, however, were less clear: Where did this happen, when was the video recorded, who were the killers, and why did they kill? The fact that the killers had filmed the crime suggested that they were confident in their impunity. Only precise answers to journalism’s enduring questions—what, where, when, who, and why—could revoke it.

This is the task that investigators at the BBC’s Africa Eye unit undertook over the next few months—an investigation for which they have just won a Peabody Award. Africa Eye was able to geolocate the site, matching topographical features from the video to satellite maps; establish the time, using shadows as sundials; confirm the killers’ identities, by cross-referencing social media profiles with government records; and establish that the executions were part of Cameroon’s counter-terrorism operations against the extremist group Boko Haram. Africa Eye’s findings led in February 2019 to the US’s withdrawing $17 million in funding for the Cameroonian Army and European Parliament’s passing a strong resolution condemning “torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings perpetrated by governmental forces.”

The investigation was a triumph of journalism. The smartphone that had captured the victims’ last moments had turned from voyeur to witness. [Continue reading…]