May 2, 2019
All times appear as local time UTC-4. Venezuelans awoke to a tumultuous morning on April 30, 2019. Leopoldo López, the leader of the Voluntad Popular [Popular Will, VP] party — under arrest since 2014 — had been freed. In a pair of messages shared on his Twitter account, López appeared beside National Assembly president Juan…
April 28, 2019
By Robert Evans
On April 27, 2019, at around 11:30 a.m. local time, a young man with a semi-automatic rifle walked into the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in Poway, California. He opened fire, killing one worshipper and wounding three others. In the hours since the shooting, a manifesto, believed to be written by the shooter, began circulating online….
April 4, 2019
On March 23, 2019, Twitter lit up with a series of images showing two Russian aircraft at the Simón Bolívar International airport just north of Caracas, Venezuela. The images also showed a group of individuals in uniform disembarking from one aircraft, and cargo being unloaded from the other. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian…
March 10, 2019
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
On Saturday February 23 2019, hundreds of volunteers and political activists hoped to deliver over 600 tonnes of humanitarian aid into Venezuela on two bridges connecting Colombia’s Norte de Santander department with Venezuela’s Táchira state, and a road connecting Roraima and Bolívar states in Brazil and Venezuela, respectively. The highly anticipated event was part of…
February 15, 2019
Newly uncovered evidence going back to 2015 suggests that the Ukrainian white nationalist Azov movement has been systematically co-opting American right-wing extremists to advance the former’s own international agenda. In audio statements uncovered by Bellingcat, this agenda was summarized by the International Secretary of the political wing of Azov, the National Corps, as “world conservative…
February 12, 2019
All times appear as local time UTC-6. Human rights organizations and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have, in recent years, become aware of the importance of open source information for documenting and investigating potential war crimes and crimes against humanity. Even the International Criminal Court (ICC), in an August 2017 arrest warrant against Libyan general Mustafa…
February 11, 2019
By Robert Evans
For the past two years, the city of Portland, Oregon has been terrorized by a series of increasingly violent clashes between Patriot Prayer, a right wing protest group, and several antifascist groups. The most vicious of these conflicts occurred on June 30, 2018; what started as a Patriot Prayer rally descended into a riot. Five…
January 25, 2019
All times appear as local UTC-5. On January 17, 2019, at 9:32 AM, an SUV loaded with 80 kilograms of pentolite exploded inside the Escuela de Cadetes de Policía “General Francisco de Paula Santander (General Francisco de Paula Santander Police Cadet School, ECSAN), the Colombian National Police academy located in southern Bogotá, killing 21 people…
December 22, 2018
By Bellingcat Investigation Team
All times are shown as UTC-4 local time. On December 8, 2018, reports appeared on Twitter claiming that YV2030—an airplane used by President Nicolás Maduro’s nephews during their failed drug trafficking career—was taking part in a military operation in Canaima, a remote town located in Venezuela’s Bolivar state. The news came via a journalist named…
October 31, 2018
By Robert Evans
During the week of October 21-27, 2018, the United States suffered three separate far-right terrorist attacks. Robert Bowers, the Tree of Life Synagogue shooter, and Cesar Sayoc, the so-called “MAGAbomber,” both left substantial social media footprints on Facebook, Gab and Twitter. Bellingcat has combed through as much as we’ve been able to find in order…
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