Personal items belonging to the British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have been found in an area of flooded forest near the Amazonian river on which they were last seen.
The objects were discovered on Saturday thanks to a small but determined Indigenous search team that has spent the past seven days on the frontline of the hunt for the two missing men who had both, in different ways, championed the Indigenous cause.
On Saturday morning a handful of volunteer searchers from the Matis Indigenous group came across what they suspected could be items belonging to the missing men.
One Matis volunteer said they had decided to enter the secluded location off the River Itaquaí after hearing what they thought sounded like somebody banging on an aluminium canoe.
“They felt it, they imagined it and they went in paddling [their canoes],” said Binin Matis. “Indigenous people can feel these things, like a spirit. [It was like] a forest spirit saying, ‘There is some object in there.’ This is how Indigenous people think.”
A larger group of Indigenous volunteers – accompanied by members of Brazil’s military police force and a Guardian reporter who has been embedded with the Indigenous search teams – returned to the location at just after 4pm and found a series of items floating in the area’s murky brown waters.
After spotting a blue tarpaulin that had been tied to a tree and was recognised as belonging to the local Indigenous association, searchers found a piece of clothing that activists recognized as belonging to Bruno.
“They’re Bruno’s! They’re Bruno’s!” searchers shouted as they examined the item.
Minutes later a pair of dark-coloured trousers – which people who know Pereira also recognized as being his – emerged from the water before disappearing out of view.
Federal police officers were summoned and, after arriving on Sunday morning, sealed off the narrow channel of water leading to the area and deployed a team of forensic officers.
The forensic officers entered the flooded forest in small boats and confirmed the find.
On Sunday evening a federal police statement said the recovered items included a pair of trousers, a pair of boots and a healthcare card belonging to Pereira and a backpack filled with clothes and a pair of boots belonging to Phillips.
Indigenous experts and witnesses said the breakthrough would have been impossible without the efforts and profound local knowledge of the Indigenous search teams who have been scouring the jungles and rivers of the Javari region for any trace of the two men.
“They are the Justice League of the jungle,” said one military police official involved in the search for the two men, who had been returning from a four-day reporting trip when they vanished early last Sunday.
“Without their knowledge, and without them we would never have found any of this,” said Fabrício Ferreira Amorim, an Indigenous defender who is helping coordinate the search mission.
Phillips, a longtime Guardian contributor, had been in the Javari region – which is home to the world’s largest concentration of uncontacted tribes – as part of reporting he was conducting for a book on the environment.
On Saturday his Brazilian mother-in-law conceded she no longer believed the two men would be returning home.
“They are no longer with us,” she wrote on social media. “Their souls have joined those of so many others who gave their lives in defence of the rainforest and Indigenous peoples.”
