On Monday, Brazilian police said they were going to charge a Colombian fishmonger with masterminding last year’s murders of indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips.

Rubén Darío da Silva Villar provided ammunition to kill two men, named the self-proclaimed killer before and after the crime and paid his lawyer, federal police officials said during a press conference held in Manaus.

Fisherman Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, nicknamed Pelado, confessed to shooting at Phillips and Pereira and was arrested shortly after the killings in early June. He and three of his relatives are accused of complicity in the crime. They all live in a poor riverside community in a rural settlement between the city of Atalaya do Norte and the indigenous territory of the Javari Valley.

Villar denied any involvement in the case. Prior to the announcement, he was already being held on charges of using forged Brazilian and Peruvian documents and running an illegal fishing scheme. According to investigators, he financed local fishermen who fished in the territory of the indigenous peoples of the Khawari Valley.

A statement from UNIVAJA, a local indigenous association with which Pereira worked, said it believed other important masterminds behind the killings were never caught.

Pereira and Phillips traveled to a remote region of the Amazon when they disappeared, and their bodies were discovered after the perpetrators confessed. Phillips did research for a book about saving the world’s largest rainforest.

Source: Associated Press.