When schoolboy Kian delos Santos was shot dead during the Philippines' brutal war on drugs, he took a grim secret to his grave.
Warning: This story contains details and images that may be upsetting to some readers.
The 17-year-old was seized by three police officers near his home in the impoverished community of Caloocan in Manila in 2017 before he was shot and killed in a dark alley.
Police claimed he was a drug runner who had threatened them with a gun — a story his family has always denied.
Witnesses at the time disputed the officers' account of what happened, sparking an unprecedented national outcry over the country's war on drugs.
All three officers were eventually convicted of his murder and given prison sentences of up to 40 years, though one has since died and the other two are still appealing against their convictions.
But it is only now, five years on, that Kian delos Santos's family finally have the full story.
Like many other drug war victims, the teenager's family was poor and could not afford to give him a proper burial.
They instead paid for a five-year lease on a gravesite in a public cemetery.
After the lease expired in August, his body was dug up so it could be cremated or buried somewhere else.
While an official autopsy after his death in August 2017 showed he was shot twice in the head, a post-mortem examination last year revealed a third bullet in his chest.
"Finding the bullet still in the body proves that the Philippines National Police's previous statements were just lies," the boy's uncle, Randy delos Santos, said.
"If this is what happened to us, what about all the other cases?"
The truth about Kian delos Santos's death – and those of dozens more caught up in former president Rodrigo Duterte's campaign — has come to light thanks to one woman: Raquel Fortun.
The forensic pathologist, who works at the University of the Philippines in Manila, is just one of two in the whole country.
Her detailed examinations have allowed many families to find closure five years after the start of the Philippines' war on drugs.
A pathologist with a holy mission
The Duterte government’s six-year crackdown on drug suspects claimed the lives of thousands of Filipinos before it ended in 2021.
"The killings started in 2016 and, you know, they really targeted the poorest of the poor," Dr Fortun told the ABC.
"That's the irony of it all. We wouldn't be exhuming these cases and re-examining them if they killed people who could afford a burial."
The laborious process of conducting post-mortem examinations — and documenting them in a written report — has often taken Dr Fortun away from her other duties as a forensic pathologist.
Without even a proper examination room, she says she has had to "repurpose" an old classroom at the university into a makeshift lab, using tables "sourced from a junkyard".
The remains she examines are typically in a severe state of decomposition, riddled with maggots and barely recognisable.
But still, she does what she can to clean the bodies and hand back the clothes so the families can give them a more permanent burial.
The process also allows Dr Fortun a window to carry out a full, independent post-mortem examination.
She has partnered with Catholic priest Father Flavie Villanueva, who has been involved in helping families exhume the bodies and those still grieving their loss.
It was Father Flavie who asked Dr Fortun if she would also examine the remains to test the official cause of death and see if the original post-mortem examinations were indeed correct.
"The bones speak the truth," he said.
"Others would think that the bones have nothing to say, that after five years the bones would remain silent, but we've proved them wrong."
So wrong in fact, that Dr Fortun's findings have uncovered a whole new scandal.
Of the roughly 70 bodies exhumed in the past year or so, the forensic pathologist found about 10 per cent were given death certificates that falsified the cause of death.
Costly autopsies and suspected complicity
Among them are cases like Renato Austria's. The suspected drug dealer and father of nine was gunned down outside his home in 2016, in the very early days of Mr Duterte's drug war.
His mother Theresa Austria said plain-clothes police arrived at the door one day and raided their home before forcing her son outside.
Mr Austria's family members heard the gunshots and later found his body.
"At the funeral home I was asked to pay 35,000 pesos (about $US700) … for an autopsy. I was distraught. We had no money," Ms Austria said.
"They already killed my son. Now they're milking us."
Yet she agreed to sign a death certificate declaring he had died of sepsis because she could not afford the extra costs involved with pursuing a criminal investigation.
"My only goal was to get his body. So I just signed the documents, even though I knew it wasn't sepsis," she said.
Renato Austria's exhumed body was one of the first Dr Fortun examined.
Her findings confirmed what his mother has always known: He was shot multiple times.
Bullets were found in his head and torso, and one went through his chin.
Dr Fortun has questioned whether medical authorities have been complicit with police in agreeing to certify a cause of death that is clearly wrong.
She points to one case where a doctor in an emergency room signed a death certificate saying someone died from three gunshot wounds.
"… But when the exhumation came up [recently, his wife] had to get a … copy of the death certificate and she was surprised to find a different doctor signed it as some natural cause. How did that happen?" Dr Fortun said.
"And you have to consider that many of these deaths actually involve police-state agents. So why would they properly investigate? They did the killing, they would do the investigation and the autopsy. So it's highly suspicious."
Father Flavie says there is already enough potential evidence for some families to launch legal action against police or the state. But he says it is unlikely to happen.
"With a government whose judicial system is so questionable, I think it's just a futile exercise to file legal actions," he said.
"Second, in filing legal actions, it would compromise the safety of the family because they would become more open to public scrutiny."
Pressure on Philippines ramps up over costly campaign
The Philippine government's data acknowledges more than 6,000 people were shot dead under Mr Duterte's anti-drugs campaign.
Human rights groups estimate the true figure is somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000.
If Dr Fortun's findings thus far were extrapolated to all drug-war victims, the number of those buried with false death certificates could run into the thousands.
Part of the problem, she said, was the lack of a functioning death investigation process in the Philippines, which meant homicides were rarely given the scrutiny they deserved.
"We don't have standards here," she said.
"We don't have a law, for instance, that says victims of violent death must automatically undergo … a forensic autopsy as part of the investigation.
"So there's hardly any real investigation that goes on … from the crime scene all the way to the crime laboratory."
That in turn, she said, put pressure on very poor families to sign off on death certificates they knew were wrong.
"The funeral parlours get to charge the families an amount that's quite exorbitant for them because they're really poor," she said.
"So to avoid paying, they just sign forms [or] waivers that [say] they're not interested in an investigation, that they will not pursue anything … They will accept it just so the body can be buried and they can move on."
The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced only last month that it would resume its own investigation into the drug-war killings, saying it was not satisfied the Philippines was taking proper steps to carry out its own investigation.
The Hague-based court had suspended its inquiry in 2021, after the then-Duterte government said it was looking into the killings, which meant the ICC – a court of last resort – no longer had jurisdiction.
It remains unclear how much co-operation the current government of Ferdinand Marcos Jr will extend to the court's investigators.
Father Flavie says his organisation has been "in contact" with the ICC, but he can't yet say whether the post-mortem findings from Dr Fortun's examinations should be handed to the court.
At 60 years old, Dr Fortun remains determined to continue with her extra workload.
That is despite being diagnosed with breast cancer a year ago and undergoing weeks of chemotherapy, before breaking her arm badly in an accident.
Her final years of work will coincide with the exhumation of drug-war victims who were killed and buried in five-year plots during Mr Duterte's presidency, which ran from 2016 to June 2022.
She accepts the workload will not ease before she retires.
"My problem here is it takes weeks for me because I only do these examinations when I have time," she said.
"My sense of mortality is at an all-time high."
