I got there just as the Indonesian army patrol was leaving. These men are part of the Indonesian army's notorious specials forces. They told us they'd just been in a gunfight with GAM (Free Aceh Movement) rebels earlier in the morning.

I followed the narrow dirt road leading to a dirt village they'd just patrolled. There we found a burning roadblock. People had just started coming out of their houses. One woman was inconsolable, troops had broken her door down with automatic gunfire to search for suspected rebels.

But this was just the start. We had stumbled across a massacre. The villagers were desperate to tell us what had happened. "The TNI [Indonesian army] come to the village and they take some people in the rice field," one man told us. "They just shoot them, they just shoot them and the people die."

We found the main witness at the cemetery, where the bodies had been buried quickly, according to Muslim tradition. We cannot use his name here, but he says he saw everything from a hiding place in the palm trees. "They asked the victims to stand in front of the rice fields and then they killed them one by one in the back and then they threw their bodies to the rice field," he told me.

'Young victims'

My translator and I walked past the area where the killing had happened. I stopped to ask a group of women what they had seen. One woman said she did not see the killings happen, but that she was a relative of one of the victims. She said they were not members of GAM. "They are not GAM – they are working in the rice fields, they are not the GAM, [because] they were very young," she told us.

At least eight young men were killed here. The youngest was 11, another 13, another 14, and none of the remaining five were over 20. The villagers told me that all had the same injuries – shot in the back of the head.