SHORTLY before his death, Petar Sutovic, a former law student, sent a studio portrait of himself to his mother with the handwritten message: “They say a picture can say 1,000 words.”

When the 25-year-old Briton died, supposedly on the bed of his Belgrade flat, investigations in Serbia and Britain initially pointed to a drug overdose. But a set of photographs of the crime scene betray clues that his mother, Susan Sutovic, a prominent London human rights lawyer representing Serbian dissidents, believes indicate that he was murdered.

The pictures, never before published, convinced a High Court judge that a British inquest may have reached the wrong conclusion by ruling out foul play.

Paul Canning, a former Scotland Yard photographic expert, has analysed the shots and spotted inconsistencies which he says suggest that the scene was staged. His chilling conclusion is that the Briton was brutally beaten before the photographs were taken but may have been pictured still alive, unconscious and about to be finished off.

Mr Sutovic, a Londoner, had gone to live in the Serbian capital after a road crash that left him severely scarred and self-conscious about his appearance. In hospital, he had been given medical morphine. His post-traumatic stress disorder required treatment at the Priory Hospital in London.

Young men with disfigured torsos attract few stares in the war-ravaged Balkans. Mr Sutovic became devoted to his Orthodox Christian faith. He visited his father’s relatives in the countryside of Montenegro, his parents having become estranged. Physically, he gained the confidence to take up boxing. While he hoped one day to complete his legal studies, he lived easily on an allowance in low-cost central Belgrade in a flat bought by his mother.

Mr Sutovic died in January last year. A Serbian post-mortem examination blamed his death on an intake of drugs. The body was flown to Heathrow for burial and arrived, unusually, fully clothed rather than wrapped in a shroud. A Home Office pathologist examined the body and concluded that no injuries could be seen externally or on further examination.

Mrs Sutovic became suspicious when her son’s housekeeper in Belgrade opened a bag of the dead man’s clothing that had been sent back by the Serbian mortuary. The clothes were heavily bloodstained. She then examined the garments in which he had been flown to Britain. Again, these items appeared to be soaked in blood.

She hired independent investigators. They discovered dirty footmarks on the legs of her son’s jeans, possible evidence that he had been kicked. In Belgrade they found spots of his blood on the bedroom wall, which indicated the possibility of a violent struggle.

In the meantime William Dolman, the North London Coroner, recorded an open verdict, giving the cause of death as morphine poisoning. His conclusion was based on a toxicological report indicating high, but not necessarily fatal, levels of the drug.

Mrs Sutovic challenged the inquest in the High Court, where Mr Justice Forbes granted her permission to apply for judicial review of a “very worrying” case. The scene photographs were decisive. The court could not, he declared, ignore “the evidence of our own eyes”.

The judge said: “Plainly, an injury to the nose and the area immediately adjacent to the nose can be seen. There was plainly a great deal of blood around his head. It was sufficient to soak through and on to the mattress.

“The coroner should have gone on and looked at this aspect of the matter more closely. Had he done so, he might have been driven to the conclusion that this young man was subdued and then killed.”

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