After extracting myself from the immediate area, I'd just hit a road and become Nick Collins, freelance reporter, again. I carried a Sony Hi-8 video camera and a Nikon 35mm SLR in my daysack. On the way in to the job I'd mixed with the local population here and there to make sure I had plenty of shots. If I was caught, I wanted to look the part.

Nick Collins had an Irish passport for this job. Irish or Swiss, they're the safest documents in the world. Who's ever pissed off with Dublin or Berne? With a name like Collins but a London accent, I'd have to say I came from Kilburn. Dad just never got round to taking Brit nationality when he finished working for McAlpine in the early seventies.

Freelancers like me were two a penny out here. Young guys, and the occasional girl, trying to make their fortune with bang-bang pictures and footage that might be good enough to be syndicated round the world. I'd joined a cast of hundreds who'd booked an air ticket then headed to Dixons in search of a decent SLR camera and a few hundred rolls of film. Once in-country, they asked where all the chaos was and made for it like bees to a honeypot.

Shouts were coming from the factory. I raised my head slowly and squinted through the dull, grey light. A group of Serbs were playing football again to warm themselves up. They were in a ragbag of uniforms. Some had camouflage; some were in what looked like German army-surplus parkas. Some were wearing wellington boots with thick, knee-high socks folded over at the top; some had decent calf-height boots. I'd seen better dressed and better organized Serb troops; maybe these were the cooks and bottle-washers. Whatever, they had a new football today.

I'd watched as these guys killed two Bosnian 'soldiers' the morning before – an old man and a boy of about fifteen. They'd taken them into the factory. Judging by the screams, they'd probably interrogated them, then brought them outside and shot them in the chest. I thought it strange at the time; why not in the head? That was what normally happened. I found out why at afternoon kick-off.