CAMERAMAN VAUGHAN SMITH’S SHOT MOBILE PHONE

The mobile telephone that saved the life of the British video journalist and Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith was hit by a bullet on 6th of  March 1998 while he was filming the Serbian military assault on the Jashari family compound at Prekaz in central Kosovo.

Filming the one-sided battle from the cover of a nearby wooded hill, Smith - an independent cameraman covering the early violence in Kosovo - was caught in direct sniper fire (around 30 rounds from an AK-47 variant). He felt a dull impact at his waist, but neither being crippled by it nor seeing any blood he put it down to a kicked-up stone or a ricochet and managed to withdraw safely with his colleagues.

It wasn’t until they reached their car, kilometres away, that Smith discovered he had actually been shot. He reached for his mobile phone in his belt bag to call his wife, only to find it smashed, a bullet embedded directly in the battery.

The high-velocity bullet had been slowed down and stopped by a succession of items at waist level, tightly wrapped in a green handkerchief: a packet of Marlboro cigarettes, a thick wad of banknotes (the Deutschmarks had a neat hole drilled straight through the middle), and lastly – the mobile phone.

A massive, painful bruise on his stomach showed where the makeshift armour had saved him from a devastating torso wound.

The ruined mobile phone, complete with the bullet lodged in it alongside the pierced money and cigarettes, had become a famous artefact on display at the Frontline Club in London.

The video footage Smith was recording when shot, including his camera falling, can be seen in full on Screen 2, to the right of this artefact.

Vaughan’s colleague and translator in March 1998 and throughout the war was Jeta Xharra, the co-founder of Reporting House.