Following unconfirmed reports that the bodies of missing journalist Phillips, 57, and indigenous specialist Pereira, 41, had been discovered in the Amazon, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said he believes "something wicked" had been done to them.
On Monday, Bolsonaro told Brazilian radio that the evidence gathered by investigators indicated that the two men who went missing while traveling by boat along the Itaqua River were unlikely to be discovered alive.
According to Bolsonaro, examinations are being carried out on probable human material discovered floating in one of the region's rivers. "The indications are that something wicked was done to them," he added, per translation.
The Guardian reported the Brazilian embassy in London phoned Phillips' family in the morning, informing them that two sets of unidentified remains had been discovered during the search effort.
"He didn’t describe the location and just said it was in the rainforest and he said they were tied to a tree and they hadn’t been identified yet," Phillips’s brother-in-law, Paul Sherwood, was quoted in the report as saying.
Brazil's federal police, on the other hand, later reportedly denied that the remains of the two had been discovered. Indigenous activists involved in the search effort however said they had no such information, but that they anticipate the men's remains would be discovered soon in a flooded forest where some of the pair's belongings were found on Saturday.
Some personal items belonging to the two missing men were discovered in a flooded forest as a result of the efforts of a small Indigenous peoples' search party that has been active for the past seven days.
According to Portugal's Diario de Noticias, in another interview given on June 7, Bolsonaro said that the pair's journey was more like an "adventure," adding that two people on a boat in a region like that in the complete wilderness is not something one would recommend doing.
"Anything can happen. It could be an accident, it could be that they were executed," he reportedly said.
No contact has been made with the missing pair since June 5, when they left the community of Sao Rafael, where Pereira had reportedly agreed upon a meeting with a local leader, known as Churrasco. Later, they purportedly headed along the Itaquai River, to Atalaia do Norte, the largest city in the region. They never arrived at the location.
According to estimates, the journey there usually takes about two to three hours.
The Vale do Javari region is known for having the largest number of indigenous people in voluntary isolation in the world, but in recent years it has also become a cocaine trafficking route from Peru to Brazil, per the report.
Along with drug traffickers, the area has reportedly been invaded by miners, loggers, fishermen and illegal hunters, and some of them have been known to be particularly violent.