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As a photographer, you want to get as close as possible to your subject – to see the smallest detail without missing the big picture. That old rule will never get too old to forget.

But how do you apply it to an event which took place a decade ago?

The bigger the distance – be it time or space – the harder it gets to tell the story accurately. It gets blurred, obscured and perhaps even twisted. Some parts vanish, while others grow.

I’ve covered over 100 hundred mass graves and identification processes in my career, full of mass killings and major natural disasters. Many of these assignments took place long after the tragedy.

The Indian Ocean Tsunami was a huge disaster and “routine coverage” – such an ugly phrase – of its 10th anniversary doesn’t seem to be enough.

Of course we will find survivors and they will recount their stories, we will speak to parents who lost their children, to fishermen whose lives will never be the same again.

But then perhaps you want something else that will bring the 2004 Boxing Day disaster alive and make people stop to think for a moment: “Well, that thing in pictures – that really could have been me.”

I found out from a colleague of mine at Reuters about a shipping container full of items found on tsunami victims.

It brought to mind a masterfully executed collection of pictures by a great Bosnian photographer of items found with victims of the Bosnian war.

Naturally, we immediately started asking permissions to see what is inside that container and to film it.

Police in Thailand’s Takua Pa district, who received the container in 2011 from those who carried out the initial identification process, agreed to the request by Reuters to film its contents, and its heavy doors were opened after years.

Everyone was surprised by the items found in there, and especially the quantity of valuable possessions.

At first, we thought it would just be several boxes with items belonging to the almost 400 still unidentified victims whose remains are buried in a cemetery nearby, unclaimed. But it seems there is more.

A random box was taken out and its contents were placed on a table.

Inside was a yellow snorkelling mask, which looked children’s size, with a fine grain of sand from Thailand’s famous beaches still on it. There were amulets and a little Buddha statue. A watch and wedding rings and much more, in that black hole of pain.

It would be difficult to get closer so I took pictures of those very different items one by one. Such a big tragedy doesn’t ask for your age or profession or religion, whether you are rich or poor, an academic from the developed world on holidays or a migrant fisherman from Myanmar who came to earn just enough to feed his family back home. It’s a full scale disaster.

Unfortunately, no matter how terrible the event, soon the names will become numbers, and the numbers statistics. But we’re all thinking “That could never be me,” right?

For more pictures on Tsunami’s 10th anniversary please click here.

Behind heavy, ornate doors on the Rue de Farj, an invisible pressure-cooker whistles. Next comes the smell of food that carries me back to childhood. Two cheerful voices can be heard, both female: one is patronising, the younger almost singing. Over the thick stone wall I can see a mother-in-law teaching a newlywed girl the secrets of her cooking.

Over the next two hours of a cool Sunday morning, I stood before and photographed 55 similar and equally mesmerising doors. By noon, I was in love with Rabat’s Medina.

UNESCO made Rabat a World Heritage Site two years ago. The media and tour operators call it a “must-see destination.” But it seems the tourist hordes have yet to find out. While tourists are getting squeezed and grilled in the madness of Marakesh and Fez, the old part of Rabat – its beautiful Medina and Kasbah of the Udayas – remain an almost unspoiled oasis of calm. Smaller and more compact, its labyrinths of streets, passages and dead ends are a treasure trove of shapes and colours, of moments begging to be photographed.

The view of Medina from its south side, just under the magnificent Kasbah and across the river from Sale, is spectacular. This is where I suggest you start exploring. From the rooftop of the beautiful Hotel Udayas, built in 1918 but now being masterfully refurbished into a luxury accommodation, the view unfolds over a fort and river. What you’ll see from here offers a peek into a history full of reversals of fortune, peace accords and rivalry among neighbourhoods. What is today the ancient part of Morocco’s capital city was once three separate entities competing and sometimes fighting for primacy.

From the south, the main street that leads to the sights and sounds and aromas of the old city is the Rue des Consuls – a slightly wider alley full of shops and founduks (courtyards), with more shops and traditional workshops inside.

Shopping on the Rue des Consuls is a pleasant experience, but talking to local traders in a street with such a great history of doing business with foreigners is the must. This was a hotspot for the 17th-century Barbary slave trade. That’s what made it so important in the first place.

Rue de Consuls is where white slaves were sold. Diplomats from overseas, lacking better options, were dispatched with money collected by local communities to buy their people back. According to the narrated history, one French diplomat was so good at buying slaves back that the local rulers expelled him for ruining their business.

All foreign diplomats were later asked to live in one street, and that is how the Rue des Consuls got its name. Powerful merchant families now occupy their quarters. But I am convinced the beautiful carpets and other oriental products on sale here are just a facade; the real power must lie somewhere else. The tough faces and body language of people I photograph hint at something more profitable, possibly dangerous, than pulling tourists aside and selling them a carpet or two for double price.

Maybe it’s the history, but the general attitude of business people here seems very different from places like it. There isn’t much pestering. There are very few “mister, good price for you” attacks. It’s a very welcome surprise – a surprise that actually made me buy things I would normally ignore, such as four pairs of leather slippers in colours that don’t match anything else I own.

A legend – probably just another sweet lie told over even sweeter tea by a pencil-moustached local vendor who introduced himself as a great lover of Medina – suggests that if you listen carefully voices from long-gone cabarets still echo through the alleys. This is where the money from piracy was once spent. The old town was a place for business but also for pleasure.

In an alley I hoped would lead from the consuls’ street to my accommodation, all I heard was the sound of pinball machines. If I were religious, that is how my call for prayer would sound, and I would waste no time in entering this house of worship. Inside, the real spectacle: machines from the Eighties, Gottlieb’s Buck Rogers and other pinball legends lined by the wall; video games in the corners. I’m grateful to all the gods that made me take another wrong turn in the labyrinths of Medina. I was a lost but happy man.

Outside the darkness of this gaming shrine, boys chased a real ball. Naturally, all of them wore shirts bearing the names of super-stars – mostly Arab or Muslim players from big foreign teams. Other than Cristiano Ronaldo who is obviously above everything, I mostly see Benzema (actually, many small Benzemas), Ribery, a few Ozils and at least one curly Fellaini.

Besides shopping, chasing history’s ghosts and playing football with future stars, the real must in Rabat’s ancient quarter is to eat, eat and eat. The only advice here is do not, under any circumstances or imperatives of the world you are coming from, limit yourself to three miserable meals a day. Calories please forget – it’s a sin by any religion or ideology known to humans to suppress the organic need of trying every single one of the numerous delicacies served in Medina.

Even a vegetarian will not know what to choose from a menu full of specialities made of zucchinis, eggplants, olives, artichokes and spiced potatoes. However, my favourite remains sheep’s head offered at one of the small restaurants between the Grand mosque and Bab Chellah gates. It’s cheeks, tongue and, above all, brains are briefly fried and served with onion. Its melting taste produces a dangerous chemistry that communicates directly with hidden parts of human mind; its simply divine. Bypassing all prejudices and possible complaints about questionable hygiene of the surroundings, a sheep’s head will forever change your perspective of fast food.

But slow food is the real treat. The speciality of one restaurant, perhaps jokingly named Petit Beurre, is lamb legs. If a sheep was a centipede it would still not have enough legs for a Bosnian – that’s how much we love it. But – let me tell you – this is something different. This meat, served with boiled vegetables and sauce, melts on the tongue. I asked the chef the age of what we just ate and he said, with no sign of shame, that it was younger than nine months. It might actually be illegal in some countries to eat a mammal so young. But hey! We are in Morocco, so no complaining.

In my five short days in Rabat I felt I discovered only a tiny part of the whole spectacle. I barely saw the ocean and its beautiful beaches. I didn’t walk the wide boulevards of new Rabat, which are decorated with art deco buildings. I didn’t venture inland where, I’m told, the real magic starts.

If you plan the trip to Rabat or Morocco, make it at least three to six months long. And hurry up before seriously addictive 25-cent mint tea, nicknamed Moroccan whiskey, gives away to ten-dollar coffee; before fried brains are replaced on the menu by a deep-fried something that even the animal I just ate, wouldn’t eat.

As I am driven to Casablanca airport in an ancient white Mercedes 200D taxi, it strikes me the only real danger of visiting Morocco is that you might want to stay forever. No matter how short or long you stay, make sure you come with a hunger for everything that is hidden behind the doors of Medina. And bring lots of memory cards – your camera will be hungry, too.

See some more pictures here and here.

Baengnyeong, South Korea

Look at the little blue dot showing a current position on a map: that is the island of Baengnyeong. The map might suggest this outcrop is deep inside North Korea but it’s not. The hand in the picture is mine, the phone with its high-speed internet connection is also mine, and the barbed wire is South Korean.

Baengnyeong – like a few other islands I visited recently – lies on the South’s side of the disputed maritime boundary that separates the two Koreas at sea. Known as the Northern Limit Line, it is an extension of the more famous land border between North and South Korea – the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ – but it curves further to the north. It is the line between two fierce neighbors whose war started over six decades ago and never really ended.

I had seen many pictures of the DMZ but very few of the NLL. The DMZ looks scary but familiar: it is the world’s most heavily armed border, and the only serious boundary remaining from the Cold War.

While recent news from Ukraine suggests that similar borders could soon be drawn elsewhere, the frontier between the Koreas is the real thing: an impenetrable line dividing two different worlds that used to be one.

Life along this border at sea was unknown to me. I had seen only a few news pictures after previous deadly incidents or artillery duels between the Koreas.

There is a famous picture of North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong Un waving from a rickety, overloaded boat as his officers push the vessel into the sea just across from Baengnyeong. Unfortunately this old image was about as much as I would see from the northern side of this maritime border.

But there was no reason why the southern side should remain a mystery. I went out to document life by the boundary, and found it a strange and fascinating mix of modern, high-tech living and old paranoia.

AN OCEAN DIVIDED

When an astronomer watches the stars, patch after patch of black nothingness pass before his lens until he is lucky enough to get a glimpse of, let’s say, a supernova exploding in the distance. Usually, that distance is measured by hundreds of light years, which means he is gazing into the remote past, seeing something that happened a long, long time ago.

On a hill on a South Korean island, overlooking the Northern Limit Line, the feeling is the same. The sea is vast but we were there with our gear at the ready. The thing we were expecting to happen – some sort of interaction between old enemies – was the relic of a very distant past. During many long hours of waiting, nothing really happened. We only saw about a dozen lazy Chinese ships on the North Korean side of the NLL, out fishing.

And then, on a fourth visit the hill on the island of Yeonpyeong, just before we quit our careers as amateur observers for good, a loud siren blasted from behind the beach. At first we thought something was happening on the island, some sort of emergency perhaps, but then two swift patrol boats appeared out of nowhere, speeding towards the Chinese vessels. Following them, a minute later, was a large South Korean corvette – we saw its big guns and soldiers on the deck.

We couldn’t believe it. Ships from the North Korean side had come too close, or even crossed the invisible boundary, and now the South Korean military was chasing them away. For a short moment we thought a real drama was unfolding before our eyes, something we better record as skillfully as possible because it might be breaking news. When we planned the trip, witnessing any sort of interaction between the two sides – be it radio contact, fishermen helping each other out at sea or even petty trade – was at the top of our wish list.

What we didn’t know, and what an experienced coast guard officer explained to us later that afternoon – his voice laced with irony – was that we had gotten overexcited. In fact, such incidents are not really incidents; they happen almost every week. The South Korean military is always ready to protect its borders, and whenever it decides ships from the other side have come too close it simply chases them away.

Nevertheless, we got our supernova and a dose of adrenaline. It was a timely reminder that we were indeed deep inside “enemy territory” and that the situation could escalate at any moment.

A scene from the Cold War had played out before our eyes. Not many places in the world can offer you the chance to gaze into the past from a tourist observation point.

OLD BORDERS, OLD FEELINGS

Working by the NLL is no smooth trip through time. Sometimes it feels like the machine malfunctions, and you are left in limbo between a faded past and a colorful and futuristic present.

This is, thanks for asking, a challenge for any photographer like me trying to put together a coherent sequence of pictures, without giving the impression that I have mixed up two different series of images.

Looking north through razor wire on Yeonpyeong showed me a scene like so many others I have witnessed during my professional life: heavily armed borders, the presence of “us and them”, threats and obvious suffering … It seemed as if some outside force – some photo-shopper in the sky, perhaps – had dimmed all the colors.

But I felt comfortable, I know this situation so well. I like it and I hate it. As I framed my shot, I was almost tempted to capture the scene in a way that would deprive it of life even further, adding more salt to the wound.

But that was just for one short and depressing moment. We listened to a North Korean radio station (the signal is not jammed here, as it is in Seoul) and we almost took pleasure in the sounds we could hear, broadcast from not all that far away. The voice of a news anchor announced that the supreme leader visited another factory and gave famous “on the spot instructions” followed by revolutionary songs from what should be history. We enjoyed hearing it, in a bizarre and almost shameful way.

My relationship with totalitarianism and communism is a weird mixture of well-known painful fact and nostalgia about my late homeland Yugoslavia, my years during Perestroika in the Soviet Union and some wonderful moments I spent in Iran.

But when I witness these societies, I am often the privileged one looking at them from outside. The feeling I have here is the feeling of the reporter with a return ticket in his back pocket, who has covered disasters and wars, but can walk away any time.

MAMA KIM

If there is a female version of Chuck Norris, she can’t be even remotely as tough as Kim Ho-soon, a 66-year-old diver and fisherwoman I had the honor to meet on Baengnyeong.

Originally from the island of Jeju, where female pearl divers are not uncommon, at first sight this utterly lovable woman could be mistaken for any other elderly citizen of South Korea. Except she doesn’t spend her days enjoying long walks, gossiping or watching soap operas on TV, like most of her generation. She dives for seafood almost every day, and has done so since she was nine.

I asked her why she is still doing this now and she immediately answered: “Because I’m best at this,” as if her age counted for nothing in the cold winter waters of the Yellow Sea.

“North Korea doesn’t bother us… [South Korean] military, China and reporters are ones that bother us,” she added, while waiting one foggy morning for the military’s permission to take her three-strong crew diving and fishing.

Fishermen from Baengnyeong can’t go when and where they want and that makes them visibly unhappy. Every port on the island has a wooden booth with a young marine inside and a mast above it.

On the mast is a flag whose color Kim Ho-soon – also known as mama – checks every morning. If it’s red, that means the sea is a no-go; blue means go; and yellow is the sign of a frustrating stand-by. Often, the poor soldier manning the booth feels the heat from fishermen for flying a red or yellow flag. The messenger always pays the price.

It all makes sense, the flags and the tough behavior with fishermen. If they stray too close to the NLL, someone from the other side might snatch them, despite the constant patrols by South Korean marines. It’s the price you pay for living on such an isolated island so close to the enemy.

Soon, a blue flag fluttered on the mast, and the mama happily took us on a little boat steered by her son-in-law. As I put on another layer of clothes in an effort to stop the unstoppable wind that was blowing in from the open sea, the old lady was getting ready for a dive. Her kit: a simple mask, a knife and a bag that she fills with seafood by hand (she can bring back 40 kilograms in one go).

Soon after, she disappeared into the depths and just a tiny yellow air hose remained visible from the surface. In the background, a military corvette sailed by, marking the end of Kim Ho-soon’s world. What we don’t see behind it, dissolved in fog, is North Korea.

ONLY BEAUTIFUL, PLEASE

In North Korea, just across the invisible border and not too far from a ferry carrying three sleeping South Korean marines, rules for taking pictures are simple: only beautiful, please (to quote the title of the book by John Everard, former British ambassador to Pyongyang).

And that is only if the person with the camera is lucky enough to visit a country so many want to leave.

Journalists play a funny game – most of the time we really want to go to places that others really want to leave.

Whether in North Korea, Fukushima or Sarajevo reporters are always headed in the opposite direction, against the current and often against common sense.

North Korea probably tops the list of photographers’ dream destinations. I haven’t met anyone in this profession who doesn’t want to go there. I’ve been asked more questions by colleagues about how I once made it to Pyongyang than about anything else I’ve done in my career.

Ironically, the images we see from the North are not unlike what you remember in the morning after awaking from a nightmare: just flashes, a few details, maybe a single scene around which we knit our pain and anxiety.

The pictures in between soon vanish, or become an “only beautiful, please” image, a boring commonplace, like the images of thousands cheering for the Leader, or a pretty policewoman in white socks directing traffic in Pyongyang.

South Korea has its own “only beautiful, please” aesthetic, but it’s fundamentally different. The truth is that I have rarely been anywhere where I have been ignored or snubbed so much as on the South Korean islands near the NLL.

More often than not, people looked away or soldiers comically turned on their heels and marched in the opposite direction when I lifted my camera. At first I thought it was just bad luck. Soon I realized their photo shyness was widespread, or instructed.

It seemed like soldiers were told to turn away from a stranger’s camera if the situation was not pre-arranged; a friend who knows a lot about the subject told me they have to look beautiful and strong all the time.

I have taken many images of tough-looking soldiers, but then an important and differently beautiful frame sometimes comes along – like the one of sleeping soldiers, shown above – and offers a new perspective.

At the same time, freedoms on opposite sides of the Korean border are fundamentally different – not to be compared.

On the South side I move freely. Nobody really stops me, even if I get close to the border fence or climb the hill on which a terrifying rocket is planted. To my great delight, there is no need for any special permission; there are no unpassable checkpoints and almost no photo restrictions.

Here, I actually have a good chance to see and photograph real life as it is – both the “only beautiful, please” and beyond.

Some more pictures from island near NLL here.

Like a true professional, Maen Sopeak sings to the audience of seven people who sit on the bare floor of her room in a Phnom Penh suburb. Her singing is soft, at moments almost a whisper, but her beautiful voice is clear. In a country even slightly richer than devastated, impoverished Cambodia, she could be a star. She could perform to packed halls, wearing only the best clothes.

Maen Sopeak is, however, just a poor garment worker. There will be no sell-out crowds or fancy dresses for her anytime soon. She shares a single, hole-in-the-wall room with six other women, who all work at a nearby garment factory producing clothes for Western brands.

The song is excruciatingly sad. It tells the story of a girl forced into marriage with an older man, not the one she loves. Maen makes the grim song sound somehow joyful, although suicidal thoughts would be more appropriate. The abject conditions where she lives and works are a natural setting for this tragic ballad. Here, misery invites yet more misery. Just like in my home country of Bosnia, another devastated post-genocide country where its sevdah music is just a natural extension of everyday hardship.

I’m in Cambodia for five days to do a story on garment workers. The idea is to see how these women live, and shine some light on these conditions before a tragedy strikes (which I hope will never happen). Working conditions are better than in Bangladesh, but not by much. After a building collapsed in Bangladesh in April, killing more than 1,000 workers in the deadliest disaster in the history of the garment industry, more business has come to Cambodia. Many fear more accidents will follow.

I knew coming here was not going to be easy. No matter how long I stay, or how good or lucky I am, many layers of this complex story will remain unseen. What I have seen and photographed is not easy to put into one picture or into a single thought.

Cambodia’s garment industry is huge and getting bigger. More than 300,000 workers produce the clothing, mostly for exports. There is a high chance you have worn clothing from Gap or H&M that has been stitched together here. Demand and investments are surging. So, too, is labor unrest. That’s no surprise. Although salaries and conditions for workers in Cambodia are not as bad as in Bangladesh (the monthly minimum wage of $80 compared to only $38 in Bangladesh; in China it is $150) protests and strikes quadrupled over the last year. There have already been 48 strikes this year, more than in the whole of 2010 and 2011 combined.

In the village of Trapeng Weng, just outside Phnom Penh, more than 400 people work in a factory that makes products for Nike. “Police come every day to look for me, sometimes in uniform, sometimes as civilians,” says a man who claims to be on the black list for his role in recent and violent protests. The pay is not enough, he said, explaining the reason for the unrest. The government raised the minimum wage to $80 a month in March this year but workers complain that it is not enough and wage rises have not kept up with the cost of living.

To survive with some money left at the end of the month to send home, workers must live a very basic life. For those who come from the provinces, the accommodation is shocking: overcrowded buildings, four or even more people usually sharing “an apartment” as big as a changing room in clothing store. They each pay rent of about $10 a month, plus more for water and for a single neon light installed on bare walls. Another $10 or more goes toward transportation expenses. Food is getting more expensive.

To make ends meet a worker has to be very lucky not to get sick or overspend on anything outside the bare basics.

The problems start when something goes wrong, such as a family member dying, or a debt collector turning up. Then they borrow, creating a vicious cycle of debt and poverty that has ruined so many families, communities and countries worldwide.

Not all survive such a hard life. In the stench of a city’s slum, in a room in which every other wooden floor plank is missing, where the tin roof turns into a microwave oven, a girl nicknamed D explains why she quit garment work and joined what is colloquially called the “entertainment industry”, basically prostitution. “My mother died and it all went downhill from there. I needed quick money and could not wait for the next month’s salary. When I work in the park, it is more dangerous but I get money the same day.”

For many others, work in the textile industry is as good as it gets and better than anything else they know. Chhem Sokhorn, 37, is getting ready for work in the family’s rice field. We briefly speak about her life before the morning turns into unbearable heat and the ever-smiling woman makes a point: she used to work in the garment industry but quit to be the only one from her family to take care of her household. Her daughter is at the factory and she hopes her other children will get jobs there, too. Yes, the garment industry pays little; the hours are long and the work is hard but that is much better than tilling a rice paddy a few months a year.

With no education and no money to invest in something more profitable, the garment industry seems to be the only option. Outside an industrial zone where factories are based, young, unemployed women gather at the gates hoping for part-time work. Day or night shifts, they don’t seem to care. Their families expect them to start contributing an income.

The real problems will come later. The young and healthy can work a lot without asking too many questions.

They might dream about being a singer or an architect (like Man Chan Thea, the boy I photographed in a rice field who hates garment work because his sister is always so tired and sick from it).

But the reality is brutal and the society conservative. Investing in education or a career will not feed the family or pay existing debts. For many people I met outside walls of the factories, it is about sheer survival, nothing else.

You can see more of my pictures for this story here.

Lahore, Pakistan

A man wearing traditional white Pakistani clothes disappeared from the window back into the burning building. A minute later, a different man wearing black emerged from inside but it looked like someone was holding his lifeless body. The body was slowly pushed over the edge of the window and then released. Twenty seconds later the man in white came out again. He sat calmly for a few seconds in the open window with his back turned outwards and then just fell.

And that was it; both men were dead in less than a minute. After several long hours of fighting a raging fire (or were they short hours? Time gets twisted in extreme situations like this), this part of the story ended in the way I had feared from the beginning – the worst possible way. I shot pictures of people falling from the building to their deaths, of others crying on the ground, of desperate and helpless rescue workers.

It was supposed to be an easy pre-election day in Lahore. We did expect some heat as the campaign of the two main candidates was coming to an end but what happened that Thursday still haunts me without any signs of easing. What started as an easy day for me and poor government workers in their modern office building in Punjab’s capital ended with more deaths than in election violence across the country over the next few days.

Earlier in the day, just after arriving in Lahore I received a short text message saying that a fire had broke out on the seventh floor of a government building and that there could be some people trapped inside. I was on my way to the hospital where Imran Khan, the former Pakistani cricket player and rising star in politics, was recovering from an injury. He was big in the news and there was a possibility for journalists to see him but a building on fire, with people trapped inside, is always the priority. I put Imran aside for a while and headed toward the LDA Plaza.

As expected, the scene around the building was as chaotic and mad as in your darkest nightmares. The “do not cross” yellow line served only to make our pictures more dramatic. Hundreds of onlookers around the building stood in the way of already confused rescue teams showing no signs of fear or respect for the situation. Later, the rumor spread that the building had cracked and it may collapse – nobody either cared nor moved back an inch.

Inside the building, the situation was much worse. Above the seventh floor where the fire originally broke out, there were scores of people trapped. Obviously, they couldn’t make their way out of the building and had to be evacuated. It was not such a high building – only nine floors – and was accessible from three sides so one would think there must have be a way for all of the government employees to be rescued.

Unfortunately, that’s not what we witnessed over the next several dramatic hours.

Those who made it to the roof – some of them climbing ropes and cables up the facade of the building – were saved by helicopters. The aircraft hovered low above the burning building making the fire go wilder and launching a dangerous storm of debris that flew into people’s eyes and our cameras. But, for the people on the roof that was a salvation – one by one they were taken to safety. I could read the relief in their body language, no matter how small they looked through my lens as the helicopters flew away.

For others who were not lucky enough to make it to the roof, what seemed like a manageable fire soon turned into an inferno. At some point, more based on what I saw around me on the ground, I realized there was a minimal chance for these poor people to be saved. I’m not an expert in rescue procedures but this operation didn’t look very promising from the very beginning.

I focused my mind and cameras on two men, both sitting on the windows of the seventh floor, their legs hanging outside and faces wrapped in scarves to block the heat and the black smoke – one on the east and the other one on the south side of the building. For hours they both frantically gestured towards firefighters who could not do much except spray the building and cool victims with water from afar. Time was running out and the gestures of people trapped became weaker and weaker.

I quietly told a friend of mine, another journalist at the scene, afraid to hear it myself “they will jump”. He just closed his eyes; we both knew it will happen.

What happened later I had to carefully reconstruct – frame by frame in my head and pixel by pixel in my pictures. The final image was mind-blowing and very disturbing. But, it’s not really important what I say here – did they really jump to their deaths or just fall? For two men from the south side of the building the raging and approaching fire was too much – they could not stand the heat and smoke anymore. The man from the east side was still hanging onto the window for a long time but his movements were weaker and weaker. At some point he stopped showing signs of life.

In total, 25 people died in the terrible accidental fire at LDA Plaza in central Lahore on that day, local media reported later. The elections that brought me to Pakistan were relatively quiet and Imran Khan was still in the hospital.

For more pictures please visit the gallery here.