Late in the afternoon of Dec. 12 last year, Wa Lone’s cell phone rang. It was a man named Naing Lin, a lance corporal in Myanmar’s 8th Security Police Battalion.

The policeman urged Wa Lone, a 31-year-old reporter with Reuters, to meet him immediately at the battalion’s barracks on the outskirts of Yangon. Night was falling around the golden spires of the pagodas in this former capital city.

“He told me that if I don’t come now,” Wa Lone would later recall in a Myanmar courtroom, “I might not be able to meet him because he is about to transfer to another region.”

Wa Lone, whose large eyeglasses rest on chubby cheeks, had spent weeks looking into Battalion 8. He was working on a story about the murder of 10 members of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority during a military operation in western Rakhine State. And he’d gotten his hands on explosive material: photographs of the 10 men before and after they were killed.

One picture showed the men’s bodies, hacked and shot to death, in a shallow grave. Another, taken while they were still alive, showed them on their knees. In the background, milling around with assault rifles, were members of Battalion 8.

Before going to meet the lance corporal, Wa Lone checked in with the Reuters bureau chief, Antoni Slodkowski, who told him to take another reporter along. That man, 27-year-old Kyaw Soe Oo, was visiting from Rakhine State and had recently been hired by the news agency.

Setting out at about 6 p.m., the bureau’s white Nissan SUV crossed an overpass that overlooks Inya Lake, ringed by homes of Myanmar’s elite, including the nation’s de facto leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. It was a world beyond the reach of Wa Lone, the son of a rice farmer from a village of a few hundred people.

About halfway to the Battalion 8 compound, the SUV was stuck in traffic. Wa Lone later remembered feeling uneasy: Why had the policeman insisted on him coming right away? The reporters discussed turning around. But they decided to push on.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo made it to the entrance of Battalion 8 around 8 p.m. After meeting Lance Corporal Naing Lin and a second policeman, the reporters said in court, they went with the cops down the street to an open-air beer garden. The men ordered beer and fish crackers. They talked about Rakhine State, Naing Lin recalled in court testimony. He told the reporters about coming under attack by Rohingya insurgents on Aug. 25 last year, as the militants launched a series of assaults on police stations.

When it was time to go, Wa Lone later said in court, Naing Lin handed him a copy of the Myanmar Alin, a state-run newspaper, rolled up with some documents inside. As the two reporters left the restaurant, they were surrounded by men in civilian clothes. "These are secret documents!" Wa Lone recalled one man shouting. A pair of handcuffs was slapped on Wa Lone’s wrists, and another on Kyaw Soe Oo’s. They were then pulled into two parked cars.

Naing Lin recalls the encounter differently. He testified in court that Wa Lone called him on Dec. 12 to request a meeting, and that when he met the two reporters at the beer garden, he came alone. He also denied giving Wa Lone any documents.

With their arrest, the two reporters were thrust into the murky confluence of military and civilian rule in this ethnically fractured nation of some 50 million people. To dignitaries in Western capitals, from Pope Francis to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, their incarceration would become a test of press freedom in Myanmar, and how far the country has traveled toward a more open society. On July 9, a judge charged the two under the Official Secrets Act, a law that carries a maximum sentence of 14 years.

At the beginning of this decade, Myanmar was a focus of hopes for democratic progress in Southeast Asia, a neighborhood long marked by strongman regimes. Aung San Suu Kyi was released in 2010 after about 15 years of house arrest under a military government. In 2015, her party swept general elections.

For the youth of Myanmar, like Wa Lone, that sharp turn of events brought a sudden, historically improbable expectation of freedom after decades of brutal military rule. But the army never fully relinquished power: In 2008, it put in place a constitution granting itself broad powers and control of key ministries.

And peace has not come to Myanmar. Deadly ethnic conflicts, obscure to most of the world but bloody at home, have continued to rumble.

Last year, widespread enmity for the country’s best-known ethnic minority, the Rohingya Muslims, fed a savage military campaign that forced some 700,000 people to flee their homes for Bangladesh. Now, the Myanmar army stands accused by United Nations officials of having committed widespread killings, mass rape and ethnic cleansing. In the face of this condemnation, Suu Kyi has not uttered a word of public criticism of the armed forces.

A spokesman for Aung San Suu Kyi, Zaw Htay, and an Army spokesman did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Zaw Htay has said that Myanmar’s courts are independent and the reporters are receiving a fair trial. The military has denied its troops took part in ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State last year.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo’s reporting on the massacre of the 10 Rohingya men was published by Reuters in February. The article placed them at odds with their country’s Buddhist majority, to which the reporters, Aung San Suu Kyi and top military leaders all belong. Much of that majority despises the Rohingya, viewing them as foreign interlopers from South Asia. It was groundbreaking investigative journalism in Myanmar. But to their own people, the reporters’ quest for truth was an act of betrayal.

The pair have been behind bars for almost eight months, most of that time at Yangon’s Insein Prison, a hulking edifice of 19th century British colonial architecture that has held thousands of political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi herself for a brief period. And they have been appearing in court since January, sitting through more than 30 hearings. A verdict in their trial could be handed down in the coming weeks.

The story of the two reporters and their roles in Myanmar’s experiment with press freedom is pieced together from their testimony and that of police at their trial. It also draws on other accounts given by Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo and interviews with their colleagues, their relatives and their friends.

The day after their arrest, an order was issued from the office of the nation’s then-president authorizing police to pursue charges against the two reporters. Then, for two weeks, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo disappeared without a trace into the hands of the police.