John Aglionby – Florindo Araujo is certain that Sander Thoenes was still alive when he last saw the Financial Times journalist. The motorcycle taxi driver says they had just been repeatedly shot at as they fled Indonesian soldiers in the Becora district on the outskirts of East Timor's capital Dili when a bullet hit the front tyre, causing the vehicle to crash and the two men to fall.
"I know he [Thoenes] was still alive then, bullets had not hit him because I didn't see any blood," Mr Araujo says. "The [Indonesian soldiers] shouted: 'Get him. Kill him' and they pointed their guns at us." Mr Araujo fled the scene. The next time Thoenes was seen was as a corpse the following day, lying on his side in a pool of blood down an alley not far from where Mr Araujo says they fell.
The attack occurred on September 21 1999 as East Timor was in turmoil. Three weeks earlier the people had voted overwhelmingly for independence from Jakarta and the Indonesian military was rampaging through the country before leaving.
Two members of the Indonesian army's Battalion 745 were indicted for the murder by the UN but they have never stood trial.
The traumatic events of 14 years ago have been repeatedly dissected. But they have been vividly retold – including the above interview with Mr Araujo – in a powerful 50-minute documentary by Step Vaessen, then working for Dutch television and now Al Jazeera English's Jakarta-based reporter. The film, Trail of Murder, is to be broadcast by the Qatar-based network on Thursday.
Ms Vaessen, who, with Thoenes and other foreign correspondents, had arrived in Dili hours earlier on a charter flight billed as a "one-way ticket to hell" weaves two themes through the film.
For many viewers the most gripping thread will be Ms Vaessen's retracing of the murderous journey of Battalion 745 from Lospalos in the far east of the country to Dili to board transport ships back to Indonesia.
The UN blamed the battalion for 17 counts of crimes against humanity, including 14 murders – the death of Thoenes among them – in the wake of the independence referendum.
Ms Vaessen's interviews provide jaw-dropping witness accounts. Jacinta da Costa, for example, describes how her nephew happened to return to their village when the battalion was passing through. "They captured and killed him, took his body and hid it in a river," she says.
Perhaps because time has healed her grief, or because of the fatalistic nature of East Timorese culture, she shows almost no bitterness, let alone anger. "War in this world has to be like that," she continues, adding that she herself has three children conceived during repeated rapes by Indonesian soldiers during Jakarta's 24-year occupation of the former Portuguese colony.
Retired General Wiranto, who was the Indonesian military chief in 1999 and has also been indicted over East Timor but never prosecuted, does not deny that Thoenes's murder and the other atrocities happened. But he justifies them to Vaessen by saying the conflict was "state policy", that he lost many subordinates and attributes them to "the dynamic of change".
I knew Thoenes well and count Ms Vaessen as a friend, so the second theme of the documentary is equally gripping: Ms Vaessen's search for closure, although she openly admits she is not quite sure on what.
Both Ms Vaessen and Thoenes were Dutch and had become close friends in the way that foreign correspondents from the same country do. "Everyone chatted with Sander, he was that kind of man – young, smart and keen," she says in the film of the 30-year-old reporter who talked his way into the FT by gatecrashing a reception in Moscow and charming the then editor Richard Lambert who was attending.
For Ms Vaessen, however, Thoenes's death is only one part of the tragedy of East Timor. Her cameraman at the time was her husband, Andre Bentlage. Covering the crisis affected him deeply and in its wake, she says, he became so depressed that he committed suicide in 2010. For all its sadness, though, the documentary does, thankfully, end on an upbeat note.
Near the end is a shot of the memorial stone the East Timorese made to mark Thoenes's death. Underneath his name it says simply: "Murdered in search of the truth".
FT journalist John Aglionby covered the 1999 East Timor crisis for the Guardian but was not on the September 21 flight to Dili because his wedding was four days later, a ceremony Thoenes had said he would attend "if I am in town".