The source is the Bellingcat,
which has very close links to the British special services.
We are concerned about our security.
I mean, we’ve had Russian state officials lie about us.
So Bellingcat, it’s not a media.
This is the tool for the “deep” establishment to leak certain things.
What you are telling now—
that everything that was published in the Bellingcat is the truth—
we don’t believe it.
We’ve been targeted by hackers as well from Russia
on multiple occasions.
And, of course, with identifying Russian assassins,
there’s questions about how safe we are because of that.
Now, you kept saying that Bellingcat being a tool of the establishment.
What is the evidence?
I cannot present to you the evidence,
but we have a feeling.
It’s like now when I travel to hotels,
because of these Russian poisons, I won’t be eating in the hotels.
If they leave something out, like a cake or an apple,
I chuck in the bin straight away.
[Super_Users]
[Bellingcat: Exposing a Russian Assassination Squad]
I’m Eliot Higgins. I’m the founder of Bellingcat.
We investigate a range of topics,
including the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17,
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury,
and the poisoning of the opposition leader Navalny in Russia.
We have 20 members of staff.
They were really diverse and they have all kinds of backgrounds.
We have someone who’s working for Microsoft in Finland,
someone who is kind of doing business intelligence for a bank in the US.
We have someone who’s a father looking after his disabled daughter,
who had a talent for 3D modeling.
Like, a real range of different backgrounds.
We’re in the kitchen of Eliot Higgins.
I’ve kind of grown up on the internet.
And I was always on forums and argue with people online
whether or not videos were real or not.
In 2011, the Arab Spring had been going for a while
and Libya was this kind of escalating conflict.
I didn’t have any experience or background
in analysis or investigation.
It was just the kind of mainstream media were ignoring it
because they felt they couldn’t verify it.
And often it was like, “How do you know where this was filmed?”
And that’s why I kind of stumbled into
doing what we now call geolocation,
which is using satellite imagery to compare that to video footage
that might be from anywhere in the world
and use various landmarks visible in both the satellite imagery
and the video to figure out exactly where these videos were taken.
It was one of the first videos I actually ever geolocated.
It was a place in Libya called Tiji.
Rebel groups in the area had claimed they had captured this town,
but there were questions about whether or not it was authentic.
So I looked at this video and I thought, “Well...
I can see this mosque, it’s got a dome and a minaret
and it’s next to this road.
And actually down the road, it’s two lanes of traffic,
so that’s pretty wide.
So I went to Google Maps,
and I looked at the satellite imagery,
and I saw the local area.
And in this local area,
there is a long road running through the center of the town.
And if we follow that road along,
we actually come to a location where there’s a mosque
with a dome and minaret.
And if you start looking at the smaller and smaller details of it,
you can actually see that it’s not just
the dome and the minaret that matches,
but the wall that’s next to it,
the curve of the pavement near it,
the position of utility poles, buildings,
and all these other details.
And that allowed me to confirm
this was exactly the location of the video.
And it was the first time
I actually used this kind of technique called geolocation.
It kind of became like a puzzle to solve with each new video.
It was just me, you know,
playing spot the difference with satellite imagery and videos.
By 2012, the conflict in Syria was escalating,
and there were more armed groups appearing.
And I wanted to know what weapons they had,
so I started examining them.
And then bombs started being dropped on these people, and mortar shells,
so I started trying to ID what they were.
And because there’s such a vast amount of information online
about Soviet-era weaponry, like, really detailed information,
it was possible from even fragments of these bombs
to figure out exactly what bombs were being used.
If I saw a weapon, I could figure out what it was really quickly.
But there started being these videos shared online
by rebel groups in the south of the country
with weapons that I’d never seen before, completely new.
And I was like, “Well, what are these?”
And they didn’t seem to be
anything that had been used in that region before.
I’d basically discovered this kind of secret weapons exports
from the former Yugoslavia
being smuggled by the Saudis through Jordan
to the rebels in the south
by watching YouTube videos.
I launched Bellingcat on July 14th, 2014.
Three days later,
Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine,
a passenger plane that had 298 people on it.
And it became this huge international incident.
We’ve been really able to document
Russia’s involvement with the shooting down,
despite their continual denials and propaganda and disinformation.
The first thing we were able to show was the route of the missile launcher
filmed and photographed on the day MH17 was shot down.
We’ve also not only been able to show where the missile was in Ukraine
but track it through Russia
because a few weeks before MH17 was shot down,
there was a convoy of Buk missile launchers
that went to the border with Ukraine.
And one of those missile launchers had damage and markings
that matched perfectly to the one that was in Ukraine.
So we were able to prove that Russia supplied this missile launcher.
The cockpit section of MH17
broke off and landed in a field of sunflowers.
People then went to it and started taking photographs of it,
walking around it.
I took all those photographs. I put them in order.
So it was like a Google Street View of this aircraft that was in pieces.
Within a day or two, we were able to establish that
the front left side of the cockpit
had been peppered with what appeared to be shrapnel.
And there was no other damage like that anywhere else on the aircraft.
It was showing this is where the Buk missile that shot it down exploded.
A few years ago, Russia published a series of posts on social media
claiming that it had irrefutable evidence that
the US was helping ISIS to recover its combat capabilities
after fighting in Iraq and Syria.
And in this post, they had a number of photographs
that they claimed were from drones that show this happening.
But I had actually recognized that one of the photographs
looked a bit suspicious.
It was claimed to be an ISIS automobile convoy,
but I looked at it and I thought,
“That looks a bit blocky, a bit weird.”
And I thought back to my days of gaming,
where you have AC-130 gunships,
where you sit with the black and white imagery, shooting things.
So I searched for “AC-130 gunship simulator” on YouTube.
And the first result was actually
the same video they had taken the screenshot from.
It was a computer game.
You can tell it’s a computer game
because there’s a big red “Fire” button
on the bottom right hand corner.
And this is exactly the same footage they’d been using
for their “irrefutable evidence” that the US was helping ISIS.
So they were literally caught
using computer game screenshots as evidence.
Our next kind of really big story, I would say,
would be the Skripal investigation in 2018,
where there were two suspects
in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury,
and they claimed to be sports nutrition salesmen.
They gave this big interview on
“We came to visit Salisbury’s famous 123-meter spire.”
And we actually were able to show,
using basically leaked data from Russia
because Russia is a very corrupt police state,
so you can purchase actually pretty much anything you want about anyone.
And we did it about the spies
and revealed they’re actually two GRU officers.
We also then connected that unit they belong to
to another assassination attempt in 2015 in Bulgaria.
That then led us to the discovery of Russia’s secret nerve agent program,
which had supposedly been shut down.
But we tracked all the scientists to new scientific labs,
where they just happened to be working together
and calling up the assassins in these poisonings
just before they did the poisonings.
When Navalny was poisoned in August 2020,
we looked at those people again,
discovered they were talking to some FSB members
who just happened to be part of a team
that had been following Navalny on 40 separate trips,
including the one he was poisoned on.
And now we're investigating more poisonings by the same FSB team.
So that whole story is basically stumbling across
Russia’s secret nerve agent based assassination program.
We not only have these details,
but we’ve got phone records, travel records, photos,
just masses of information
about this secret nerve agent assassination program.
We are concerned about our security.
I mean, ever since 2015, we've been targeted by the Russian media.
If I’m traveling about, I don’t talk about my travel plans
until after I’ve done the traveling.
But when you’re doing events—
because you’re not attracting just the attention of Russia,
but also basically lunatics who think you are part of the CIA
and they think you might need a good stabbing—
so you get really nervous when you do certain events.