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Bellingcat, the investigative site that unveils the suspects of the Skripal affair, was born from the efforts of one man to trace the origin of Syrian war weapons from the comfort of his sofa.
The latest revelations of the UK-based citizen journalism group on the attack of nerve agents against the Russian spy Sergei Skripal have made headlines in the world press – and they promise more to come up.
Bellingcat reported on Wednesday that Ruslan Boshirov, one of the two Russian suspects wanted by British police, was actually Anatoly Chepiga, a military intelligence colonel decorated in 2014 with the national award, the hero of Russia.
The main previous Bellingcat investigations included the MH17 flight, shot down over Ukraine by a Russian missile system, and others on the wars in Syria and Yemen.
Recent allegations exasperated Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier this month that the site was "close to the secret service".
Zakharova said Bellingcat "intentionally expels misinformation disguised as an investigation".
Bellingcat's engine is the 39-year-old founder Eliot Higgins, who became known during his investigations of the Syrian civil war as a blogger "Brown Moses".
An unemployed office worker, he had no training in journalism and his knowledge of weapons was entirely self-taught – in fact, everything he had was from movies like "Rambo".
Looking at excerpts from Syria, "I wanted to see if I could find anything from those videos, and what weapons they had, that was one thing," Higgins told AFP.
He was among the first to monitor and report on the use of barrel bombs by the Syrian regime by analyzing the strikes with open source material.
– & # 39; People who can dig & # 39; –
The name of Brown Moses was borrowed from a song by Frank Zappa, but Higgins has long since given up hiding his identity, in part to avoid any suspicion of conspiracy theory about his identity.
In 2014, he launched Bellingcat and became known almost immediately after investigating the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine.
"I wanted to launch a site that brought together a large number of people who were conducting open-source online surveys, as well as guides and case studies so that people could learn to do it themselves," Higgins said. .
Based in a small office in Leicester, central England, the Bellingcat website lists four Higgins-led staff members, 11 members of its investigative team, and 60 associates.
They have 82,000 followers on Twitter but their reach goes much further.
Half of the funding comes from grants and donations and half from the training of people in the field of open source surveys.
The website publishes guides on how to analyze the data, showing readers the methods used to produce their reports.
The September guides include "How to analyze interactive geospatial data" and "How to identify villages burned by satellite imagery", using case studies from California, Myanmar and Nigeria.
Higgins said Bellingcat offered something that traditional media does not have, although large organizations are more open to this style of investigation.
"There is a lot of really valuable material, as long as you have the people who can find it," he said.
The Skripal project is a partnership with the Russian investigation site The Insider.
"They were running the operations on the Russian side of the operation, so we conducted a large part of the open source survey to gather the information they found," Higgins said.
– New revelations about the Skripal case –
In the era of false online news, Bellingcat wants to clarify the origin of its claims.
In his latest Skripal report, Bellingcat explained in detail how the investigators came to their conclusion on Chepiga.
The investigation began with only pictures of the main suspects and their cover identities.
They claimed to have searched for images on online search engines, contacted former Russian military officers, searched pictures of a military academy directory and searched for bases. Russian data.
They then obtained excerpts from the passport file of Anatoly Vladimirovich Chepiga containing a photograph that looked a lot like a young Boshirov.
Online detectives promise new revelations next week.
Higgins said he is concerned about the personal safety of the Insider team in Russia.
Their editor, Roman Dobrokhotov, who returned to Russia on Friday from London, is awaiting arrest.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that if Dobrokhotov was afraid for his safety, "he is free to surrender to the police".
The latest revelations from the UK-based citizen journalism group, Bellingcat, about the attack of the nervous agent against the Russian spy Sergei Skripal have made headlines in the world press
Bellingcat reported on Wednesday that Ruslan Boshirov, one of the two Russian suspects wanted by British police, was actually military intelligence colonel Anatoly Chepiga.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Bellingcat of being "close to the secret service" and claimed to have "intentionally expelled information disguised as investigations"
Bellingcat launched in 2014 and made its name almost immediately with investigations into the destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in Ukraine
Chart on the known location in March of two Russians wanted by Britain for the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
