Samos And The Anatomy Of A Maritime Push-Back Refugees and migrants have all but stopped arriving on Greek islands amid mounting reports of maritime push-backs. In April of 2020, the UN Refugee Agency recorded a single landing with 39 people. During the same period in 2019, there were 1,856 arrivals by sea. The near-complete drop…
Surprise! The beer-rating app Untappd can be used to track the location history of military personnel. The social network has over eight million mostly European and North American users, and its features allow researchers to uncover sensitive information about said users at military and intelligence locations around the world. For people in the military, neither…
Today, in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports and Forensic Architecture, with reporting from Der Spiegel, and research from Pointer and Sky News, we release an investigation which demonstrates that Greek security forces likely used live rounds on 4 March 2020 against refugees and migrants trying to break through the Turkish-Greek border fence. We identified seven people…
On 5 May 2020, German media reported that Germany’s Federal Prosecutor has issued an arrest warrant against Russian citizen Dmitry Badin, the main suspect in the 2015 hacking of the German Bundestag. What Was The 2015 Bundestag Hack? In April 2015, members of the German parliament as well as members of Merkel’s Bundestag office, received…
In December 2019, the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, hosted the neo-Nazi Asgardsrei music festival for the fitfh year in a row. It was there that scores of far-right extremists and sympathizers made their way to attend a concert of National Socialist black metal (NSBM) bands, and take in a mixed martial arts (MMA) fight the evening…
In November 2019, the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) announced the broadening of its criminal investigation into the shoot-down of MH17 to encompass the role of individuals within Russia’s military and administrative hierarchy who enabled the tragedy. The JIT made public 23 telephone intercepts from the days before the shootdown, which appeared to prove the…
Previously in this series: In previous joint investigations with Der Spiegel and The Insider, Bellingcat identified the killer of a Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Georgian-Chechen asylum seeker shot at point blank in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten last August, as Vadim Krasikov, a 54 year old Russian linked to at least two contract assassinations in Russia. Using metadata…
Europol is currently in possession of more than 40 million images of child sexual abuse from around the world. In June 2017, it launched a crowdsourcing campaign called Stop Child Abuse—Trace An Object. Censored extracts from explicit images are regularly published on their website and members of the public are asked to help in tracing…
Hatred spreads quickly and can be just as dangerous as any virus. In this joint project between our partners, Newsy, and Lighthouse Reports, groups capitalizing on anti-refugee clashes on Greek islands are noted to have come from many different parts of Europe. What is their ultimate goal? Strengthen the far right in their home countries…
As Dutch prosecutors at The Hague court read out their case against four individuals — Ukrainian citizen Leonid Kharchenko and Russian citizens Oleg Pulatov, Sergey Dubinsky, and Igor Girkin — being charged with complicity in the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) passenger plane, new details emerged about the amount of evidence that…
