Five months after his mysterious death, a Manchester soldier comes home to rest

Dear readers — today’s story is about a man from South Manchester who died last year in Ukraine. But despite the perilous risks he took while fighting the Russians, Daniel Burke wasn’t killed in combat and his death has been shrouded in mystery and attended by conflicting rumours ever since.

For the past few weeks, we have been trying to piece together what happened, with the help of Anna Myroniuk, an award-winning investigative journalist based in Ukraine. What drove Daniel Burke to the bloody war on Europe’s eastern frontier? And why didn’t he come back? 

By Mollie Simpson in Manchester and Anna Myroniuk in Kyiv

It was a hot evening in early August when Daniel Burke arrived at Khortitsa Palace, a hotel overlooking the Dnipro River on the outskirts of Zaporizhzhya, a war-torn city in southeastern Ukraine. Daniel, a tall, strong ex-soldier in his mid-thirties who hailed from Wythenshawe, met his friends inside. They had dinner and drinks and then went back to their hotel rooms. Daniel woke up the next day to drive back into the city. 

One of those friends was Jerome Starkey, a war correspondent and the defence editor of The Sun newspaper, and it was the last time the two would see each other. The following morning, Daniel drove to a remote firing range with his friend Abdelfetah ‘Adam’ Nourine, a 26-year-old Algerian-Australian fighter. “Things are going good today. I picked up Adam yesterday, he’s feeling a bit down. We’re gonna go down to the range and do some target practice,” Daniel said to a friend in a voice message. “I’ll be back home and on the computer in three to four hours.”

By the time dusk had fallen, Adam had driven back to Zaporizhzhya alone. He would later tell friends that he had dropped Daniel off at his apartment around 6pm, which seemed to make sense. That evening, a British foreign fighter named James Sutton and another friend in America both received text messages from Daniel.

The following day, Adam claimed that Daniel had disappeared without a trace. In a Signal group of his close friends — including Adam — everyone started pitching in with information that might be relevant. “Call me please,” one of the friends says to Adam in the group. A minute later, he repeats his request. “Adam. Call me please.” From reading the messages, it seems that at this point, Adam is claiming that he never went to the firing range in the first place, although it’s important to note that we have only seen snippets of the group chat. 

What happened next varies wildly according to who in Daniel’s circle you ask, and in recent weeks we have spoken to half a dozen of them. Some say that Adam was subjected to 14 hours of interrogation, where he finally cracked and admitted that he killed Daniel. Another says Adam admitted to killing Daniel via message, which was screenshotted and shared around social media. 

What is clear is that the Ukrainian authorities had asked Adam to stay in a hotel in Zaporizhzhya for questioning. Death threats started appearing on his phone, and then someone revealed the name of the hotel he was staying in. Adam disappeared.

Daniel’s friends and family spent seven weeks looking for his body, including his father making a trip to Ukraine accompanied by Jerome. Eventually, human remains were found by a concrete drain, around 500 metres from the firing range. In December, Ukrainian police announced they had identified the body as a man named Daniel Burke. The death was being treated as a homicide.

‘Jihadi Dan’

Daniel Burke was born in 1987 to parents Kevin and Diane Burke and grew up in Baguley, Wythenshawe. In 2007, he started training with the British Army and was deployed to Afghanistan, where he joined the parachute regiment. 

In a detailed long read in the MEN, the journalist Beth Abbit described the horrors he witnessed there. He said he had once seen an orphaned girl, sitting alone in an empty house in a village. Daniel said he wanted her to come back with them to the military base, where it was safer, but she would risk being killed by the Taliban if she was seen collaborating with the allied forces. 

He remembered that she followed them out of the village, through the gardens and into the jungle. When they came out of a thicket of trees, they were alone and she had disappeared.

In 2009, he was discharged from the Army after getting into a fight, an incident he would later describe as a mistake. What happened over the following eight years is unclear, mostly because his family have asked for privacy at this time, and also because his social media was quiet on his return. The MEN story offers a brief description of his life after war: “After this he got a new job, bought a house and tried to carry on, but he couldn't shake the sense he was meant to be a soldier.”

We know that in the wake of the Manchester Arena attack in 2017, Daniel decided to return to war. His cousin had been at the Ariana Grande concert, and he told the MEN that the circumstances of the attack, involving the number of children killed, “tugged at my heartstrings”. He applied to join a Western-allied Kurdish militant group called the YPG, and after travelling through Greece and Egypt to a Kurdish region in Iraq, where he waited to be picked up and taken into Syria.

He operated in ISIS strongholds for about a year, where he established himself as a fearless fighter. At one point, he was in a house surrounded by ISIS soldiers when a grenade flew into the room and sent shrapnel flying. As YPG soldiers arrived to relieve Daniel and his friends, a sniper started taking shots at them. Daniel survived, but a piece of glass splintered and found its way into his thumb. It turned septic, and he needed urgent medical treatment.

Not long after, Daniel was accused of being a British spy by the YPG, an allegation that seemed to refer to the photos and documents he’d gathered to send to UK counter-terror forces. After days of questioning, he was released, and eventually, told to head home, supposedly because he had reached the point of exhaustion. He spent some time hiking through the Pyrenees before heading back to the UK. But when Daniel arrived in Calais, the police were waiting for him.

He had already heard about the terrorism charges faced by Birmingham-based father and son Paul and Sam Newey, who had been accused of helping Sam’s brother Daniel Newey prepare for acts of terrorism (the charge related to £150 that Paul had lent to Daniel Newey). Paul and Sam were facing imprisonment and fundraising to help pay for legal costs.

“Daniel knew what was coming,” recalls his friend Deborah Lindberg, who remembers messaging him at the time. When he arrived back in the UK, he was arrested on the same charges — arranging to provide military equipment and money to prepare or instigate an act of terrorism. Daniel was kept on remand for seven months at HMP Wandsworth, where he was nicknamed “Jihadi Dan”. 

Daniel always strongly protested his innocence, and his defence lawyer Andrew Hall QC would later argue that his prosecution was politically motivated by a desire for the British authorities to curry favour with Turkey, who had designated the YPG a terror group. 

The three men were due to stand trial at Birmingham Crown Court in July 2020, but following a review at the Old Bailey, the CPS abandoned the case, citing “insufficient evidence to sustain realistic prospect of conviction”. Justice Sweeney directed the court to enter not guilty verdicts for Daniel, Sam and Paul, and Daniel left prison. 

Daniel moved back to Baguley in 2020, where he spent some time working as a subcontractor for a concrete firm. He would often talk about his life in Afghanistan and Syria and express a longing to fight again someday. Dave Dennigan, one of his colleagues at the time, remembers saying, “Dan, I don’t know how you do it”, and he’d reply: “I do it, Dave, because I want to help people.”

“He was one of the most confident people you ever met,” Dave says. “We still talk about him now, at work. Those kinds of people, you never forget.”

“I would call him Badass Warrior Superhero, which he found very funny,” says Deborah, who had helped to pay the Newey’s legal costs. “That was how I saw him.”

But beneath a confident exterior, Daniel was struggling. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the experience of being imprisoned – unjustly, he felt – had left a mark on him. During the early pandemic, he was locked in a cell for 23 hours a day. At some point, he bought a plot of land just outside Barcelona and told friends he dreamed of turning it into a rehabilitation centre for other ex-soldiers suffering from PTSD.

There’s an indication in his online posting that his relationships had suffered during this period, too. In a public post on the website JustAnswer.co.uk in 2021, Daniel asked Jo C., a legal expert, for advice on whether he could receive compensation for wrongful imprisonment. “They destroyed my life. I lost my partner, family and friends, my job, 8 months of my life and they were seeking life imprisonment,” he wrote. “They caused financial problems and they just cut me loose and walked away.”

Her response suggested that any attempt at justice would fall flat. “I'm afraid there is no prospect of compensation,” Jo C. replied. “Anybody who said that there was is just simply wrong. CPS are not liable for their prosecutorial decisions, and this is not an unlawful arrest just because you disagree with their allegation. I am sorry but I have to tell you the truth.”

“A straight answer thank you Jo,” Daniel replied.

‘Not everyone's perfect, but he was a good guy’

“My biggest priority is making sure he gets justice,” says a medic who was friends with Daniel and who also volunteered in Ukraine. Like Daniel’s family and friends, the medic has been asking the Ukrainian police to investigate the foreign fighter who allegedly confessed to Daniel’s murder. But the medic says he is also concerned with another kind of justice — for his comrades to have a reckoning with Daniel’s past, and understand who he really was. “You might hear some stuff about him, but he was a good soldier, and he never intentionally got caught up with the wrong people,” he says.

We’re speaking via phone on the condition of anonymity to protect his safety, so that when he returns to Ukraine he won’t be worried about having a target on his back for defending his friend. He spends the first half hour of our call explaining that there are unjust allegations floating around about who Daniel was — stories about stolen vehicles, illegally acquired weapons and heavy drinking. They derive from unstable and untrustworthy characters, he points out. 

The important thing to understand, he says, is that Daniel was a well-loved and sometimes fatherly figure in his circle of friends, who was always willing to lend a hand to anyone who needed help. “Ukraine has a tendency to attract a lot of selfless people,” he says. “And he was one of them. Not everyone's perfect, but he was a good guy.”

Lurking in the background of what he says is the counterpoint: that wars like this have a tendency to attract less noble characters, too. 

Kacper Rękawek, author of the 2022 book Foreign Fighters in Ukraine, writes that foreign volunteers were answering the call to help Ukraine as early as November 2015, when the country introduced a law allowing foreign volunteers to be hired by the Ukrainian army on contract. The book notes that there was “a great deal of chaos and improvisation,” when foreign volunteers began to join military units to fight the original Russian invasion — Ukrainian military units would ask few questions of foreign volunteers and allow them to fight on the frontlines. People with fabricated military records or little to no experience on the battlefield were suddenly wielding weapons and being trusted with administering medical aid.

In February 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a message asking for more foreign volunteers. “Every friend of Ukraine who wants to join Ukraine in defending the country, please come over,” he said. “We will give you weapons.” Thousands of volunteers came to Ukraine, including Daniel Burke.

In an in-depth investigation published last year, the New York Times spoke to 30 fighters and reviewed over 100 pages of documents from inside volunteer groups that revealed volunteers lying about their medical and military backgrounds, stealing from each other and sometimes pocketing donations from the vast web of NGOs and startup charities that have popped up to support the war effort. “Many of the volunteers who hurried to Ukraine did so selflessly and acted with heroism,” they wrote. “But in Europe’s largest land war since 1945, the do-it-yourself approach does not discriminate between trained volunteers and those who lack the skills or discipline to assist effectively.”

An article in the Daily Telegraph noted that many foreign fighters from the UK “have simply returned home, having found that life in Ukraine’s ‘International Brigade’ wasn’t the Hemingway-esque experience they expected.” Some had described being sent on “suicide missions” without the right weapons. At least a few of them had died. 

What made Daniel abandon a comfortable life in Wythenshawe and head into another warzone? Dave, his ex-colleague at the concrete firm, believes he was driven by selflessness. “You couldn’t wish to meet a better person,” he says. “No matter how small or how big, he was always there to help, he was always first in the queue.”

A man who goes by John Caine, described by others as one of Daniel’s closest friends in Ukraine, says Daniel “experienced and witnessed some truly awful things” in Syria and Afghanistan and wanted to allow everyone to live peacefully. He was also deeply moved by the kindness of the Kurdish community and felt he should give back.

These descriptions from Daniel’s friends are insightful, but in all likelihood, they don’t fill out the full picture. Selflessness and the desire to give back don’t feel like big enough reasons on their own to travel into Europe’s most dangerous conflict since World War Two. Ukrainians who have spent time with foreign fighters in the past few years describe a trait that many of them seem to share: a compulsion they feel to throw themselves back into conflict. “They are war addicts,” one person says. 

The Dark Angels 

Daniel landed in Ukraine soon after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. We’ve learned that he linked up with the Wolverines, a fighting group founded by a Canadian veteran in his 60s. Daniel’s involvement with the Wolverines has not been reported before, and there’s probably a good reason for that: his friends didn’t particularly want it to be known (“I would want you to only say things that would make him look good,” the medic says at one point, in a different context, “I just want to give his family some peace”). But the role of friends shaping the memory of their comrade is different to the role of a journalist trying to piece together the truth. 

In the first months of the war, the Wolverines attracted press attention for their high-profile stunts, like destroying Russian tanks and scrawling the graffiti WOLVERINES in black paint, a reference to the 1984 action film Red Dawn. But within Ukraine, the group became unpopular with other volunteer groups for allegedly stealing vehicles and looting property. After a while, Daniel is said to have distanced himself from the Wolverines to start his own group called The Dark Angels, made up of foreign military volunteers, which specialised in both frontline attack and humanitarian aid. 

The group included 40-year-old Shareef Amin, who had done two tours of Afghanistan, and Sam Newey — the Birmingham student Daniel first met when they were accused of terror offences in 2018 and who had no military training. Also in the Dark Angels was Mark Eyres, a 47-year-old soldier who had been convicted of robbery after leaving the Army and who told a journalist that fighting in Ukraine beats being at home, where he was an “old git living in a rented room”.

The Dark Angels were known for their highly-skilled combat missions, including one in the southern port city of Kherson where they crept behind enemy lines and ambushed a Russian tank with a US-built javelin anti-tank missile. They had to creep through miles of landmines to get there, and on their way back, cover themselves with machine gun fire to safely retreat.

“He knew how to act in these environments, he knew how to move in these environments,” says his friend Kurt Eriksen. “I don’t want to say he was a risk taker. He was like, let’s plan the mission and keep us safe, and you felt very safe being with him. I felt he knew what he was doing.” 

It seemed the Ukrainian army was grateful for the help of the Dark Angels, too, with one high-ranking Ukrainian commander telling the Daily Telegraph that they offered a morale boost. “I can read maps and see positions, which gets you a lot of trust among the generals here – not all of their own soldiers can do that,” Daniel was quoted saying. The paper described the daring anti-tank mission as “was probably the first British-led hit on Russian troops in this part of the world since the Crimean War in the 1850s.” 

But when the Telegraph journalist Colin Freeman came across Daniel in a cafe in Mykolaiv in July 2022, it seemed the group was under strain. “Long story, but I’ve had a couple of people messing about, which I can’t accept,” he told him diplomatically. According to Daniel, there was an “incident” on base, which meant he had to “reshuffle” the squad, but he wouldn’t expand on what happened.

Why was he there? Daniel described his motives in geo-political terms, and with a dash of soldier’s bravado. “If we leave Ukraine to lose, we give Russia a lot of freedom of movement,” he said. “But unless you’re willing to fight and die here, don’t come.” His quotes attest to a man who relished, or at least embraced, the risks and grimy realities of war. “You’ve got to know what it feels like to actually get someone else’s blood on your skin,” he told the Telegraph. 

It was around this time that Daniel seemed to step back from fighting on the frontline. He started working with humanitarian organisations and doing basic medical training to see how he could help his fellow soldiers. By the summer of 2023, he had an idea to remake the Dark Angels as a humanitarian aid organisation, that would provide aid and supplies to the Ukrainians and organise emergency evacuations. He confided in one friend that when the war was over, he would go to his plot of land in Barcelona and retire from war to set up his rehab centre.

Even though Daniel didn’t manage to reform the Dark Angels, John Caine says the group will continue in his honour. Speaking via Signal messages, John describes him as a “true friend” who has “always been motivated to help people, always willing to give people a chance”. What was especially moving was Daniel’s ability to remain upbeat and cheerful in the most challenging moments. “He died here, in service of the protection of innocent people, both in Ukraine, in Europe, and worldwide,” he says. “That is Burke.”

Before we start talking about Daniel’s personality, John defaults to the same position as the medic. He says he will only talk to us on the condition that we do not change anything to suit a particular narrative, and that he would be offended if anything is misconstrued in the final article.

And then we hear one of the rumours that they’ve been worried about. An anonymous foreign fighter comes forward, alleging — without evidence — that some foreign legion fighters had approached the FBI with allegations of two NGOs trafficking in weapons and drugs, two groups that Daniel was supposedly involved with. The source, who is based in Ukraine, also makes claims about the circumstances of Daniel’s death and the state of his body when he was found that we have been unable to corroborate. 

When contacted by The Mill, the founders of both groups deny ever being involved with Daniel and both say they have never met him, and that they had only heard of his name because of his death. No one else we have spoken to has linked him to these groups and he doesn’t appear in any of the battlefield photos they have posted online, so it’s more likely that the source in question is mistaken. 

The notion that “the first casualty of war is the truth” is overused, but it’s certainly harder to pin down what exactly happened in a story like this than it would be in a domestic homicide case, where you are less likely to be speaking to compromised sources or people who, unbeknownst to you, have a dog in the fight. When we mention these claims to the medic, he advises us to go and watch a film called Courage Under Fire, a 1996 courtroom drama about an army lieutenant who attempts to reconstruct a war scene when he realises that the witnesses are all giving conflicting stories.

“You meet lots of people and you know when you are to trust people and you know when you are not to trust people, it’s kind of instinct,” Kurt says. “Daniel was a guy I felt I could trust.”

Adam has now disappeared, frustrating any attempts to work out what happened between the two men at the firing range in Zaporizhzhya. In a statement from Greater Manchester Police, who are assisting the Ukrainian authorities with their investigation, the family asked for privacy. Despite hearing from one member of Daniel’s family via text this week, we have not met them for an interview. 

John thinks back to last summer, when Daniel had returned to Manchester for a break and they went for drinks and pastries in a quiet coffee shop opposite a military shop. “We both had a glimpse back to what normal life was,” he says. Then they started talking about why, despite all the horrors they’d seen, they would both go back to Ukraine that summer. Why? “So that other people can live their lives without any understanding of how terrible things can become in the blink of an eye,” he says. 

On Monday, Daniel set off for the UK again, this trip his final one. His body is now being delivered from Ukraine with the help of the humanitarian organisation ReactAid and the Foreign Office. A man from Manchester who travelled to make his name in bloody theatres of war thousands of miles away — a man appreciated by friends and allies as a brave fighter and a good friend — will soon return home to be at rest again. 

This story was reported by Mollie Simpson in Manchester and Anna Myroniuk in Kyiv and edited by Joshi Herrmann. Contact us by clicking here.