Lost footage shows journalist’s last moments before being killed in Myanmar

A video camera capturing the final moments of a Japanese journalist fatally shot covering a Myanmar street protest 15 years ago has been found.

Kenji Nagai, 50, was filming the Saffron Revolution – a peaceful protest led by Buddhist monks against military rule – when soldiers burst onto the scene.

Nagai was killed on September 27, 2007, in Yangon, when a troop fired at him with his rifle as junta security forces launched a violent crackdown on protesters.

He was one of 10 people killed in the city that day, with at least 31 people killed during the crackdowns that swept the country, Reuters reported.

A Reuters photographer captured his final moments showing Nagai holding a camera as a bullet struck him, knocking him to the floor as people fled.

With his camera still in his hand, Nagai, who worked for the small Japanese video and photo agency APF News, rolled onto his back and lay on the street bleeding.

Myanmar authorities claimed he was killed accidentally, while Japanese officials struggled to conclude whether he was shot at point-blank range.

Nagai’s camera was missing for 16 years until it was obtained by Myanmar-focused news outlet the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), which returned the camera on Wednesday to Nagai’s family in Bangkok.

The footage was screened in front of Nagai’s family and the press today at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in Bangkok, Thailand

In the video Nagai filmed, the journalist captured images of protesters and monks sitting, singing and changing in a street close to Yangon’s ancient Sule Pagoda.

With police lining up the road ahead, trucks rammed with soldiers then pull up, with Nagai turning the camera to face himself.

‘The army has arrived. Over there, that’s the army,’ he says in the footage.

‘I think it’s a heavily armed army. In front of the temple, it is filled with citizens.

‘Citizens are gathering in front of the head of the Buddha. A heavily armed army truck has arrived.’

Nagai’s sister, Noriko Ogawa, hopes the video may act as a sobering reminder of the toll violence can take on lives – like the kind now happening in Myanmar.

The military seized power through a ruthless and bloody coup d’état in February 2021. On the first day, troops gunned down 100 citizens.

The coup erupted before Myanmar’s parliament, Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, could endorse the results of a national election held in the previous November.

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, and her part, the National League for Democracy, won with a resounding 83% of seats.

But the country’s military, Tatmadaw, had spent decades being in control behind the scenes.

Tatmadaw generals refused to accept the election results, paving the way to horrific and haunting acts of violence such as the torching of entire villages, raping women and shooting fleeing citizens.

Anti-junta protests have been fighting back since. By December 2022, the junta has killed more than 2,500 people and arrested 16,500, according to the rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

While Myanmar’s ousted leader, Suu Kyi, would find herself sentenced to three decades in jail.

‘Through this, I hope that people will once again turn their attention to Myanmar and I hope that people around the world will feel that something should be done about the current situation,’ Ogawa told reporters in Bangkok.

Nagai’s will now be sent to Japan for analysis and, Ogawa added, potentially reignite a case into her sibling’s death that for years has been cold.

‘We would like for the truth to be clarified and to be made known,’ Ogawa said, ‘that is how we feel.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.