Thread by @rcallimachi

1. Thank you for joining me as I live tweet the findings of our investigation into the deaths of Jay Austin & Lauren Geoghegan, who were among four tourists cut down by men who had pledged allegiance to ISIS last July in Tajikistan. Show starts in 13 min at 10 pm ET on @FXnetwork

2. Before the show goes live, here's the article I wrote about the deaths of this remarkable couple. They'd quit their high-paying jobs in Washington to bike around the world. More than year into their journey they met a violent end on a road in Tajikistan nytimes.com/2018/08/07/wor…

3. The show has started - welcome everyone. Jay and Lauren were hit by a car and then stabbed to death. Their families were initially told they had died in a road accident. But soon after, ISIS claimed credit for the attack, the group's first claim in Tajikistan @FXNetworks

4. Beyond claiming responsibility, ISIS also released a video showing the five men who allegedly carried out the killings. I've been studying ISIS for 5 years now, and I've never seen a case where the group releases a video of the attackers & where ISIS is *not involved.

5. Yet officials told @singeli and I that this was an ISIS "inspired" attack, meaning the attackers had learned of the terror group online & had no actual contact with them. In Tajikistan, we set out to see if we could find the place where the pledge video was recorded:

6. My Tajik colleague Abdumumin Sherkhonov recognized the blue body of water in the video as being a famous site in Tajikistan: Norek Dam, until recently the country's only dam. He spent hours traipsing over the wilderness behind it before locating the spot & then took me there

7. As an aside, I was 4.5 months pregnant when I went to Tajikistan to report this documentary, and was so out of breath on the mountainous incline going up to this site that my colleagues kindly edited out the sounds of me huffing & puffing. Finding this spot was significant:

8. Finding this spot meant we were now sure the video had been filmed in Tajikistan. In fact, the killers had specifically chosen a site that is recognizable to Tajiks - sort of how if someone filming a video in front of the Statue of Liberty everyone would know that was NY

9. After the attack, Tajik forces arrested one man, Hussein Abdusamadov, and killed four others in what they said was a confrontation. They published photographs of their dead bodies. But sitting in New York we couldn't be sure, were these the same men as in the pledge video?

10. So @singeli & @tadashi_lives and I headed to the town of Norek next to the dam pictured in the pledge video, to find the aunt of two of the alleged attackers. She identified her nephews both in the pledge video and in the photo of their bodies posted by the Tajik government.

11. We now knew that a) the pledge video was really filmed in Tajikistan and b) that the men shown in really were Tajiks, known in the community, and the men in the video were the same men who gave chase to police and who were captured / killed by security forces. That was Step 1

12. What really broke open the case for me was when we met one of the lead investigators on the case. He opened his evidence box and explained to us that the one man who had been taken alive, Hussein Abdusamadov, was the ringleader of the group. He pulled out Hussein's phone.

13. Hussein had organized the filming of the pledge video on the mountainside, which was sent to ISIS before the attack. But crucially, he had also filmed the killing of the tourists as the murder was underway. It's a horrible video to see & we published only a sliver of it.

14. This was one of the most difficult editorial decisions we made. We decided to publish a portion of the film because it proves that the men who were in the pledge video are indeed the killers. Hussein tried to send it to his ISIS contact but the network was not strong enough

15. The investigator also showed me the Threema chats on Hussein's phone. Threema is an encrypted app that ISIS members have used in the past to communicate. I saw his chats with an ISIS handler on how to send the murder video and back-and-forth discussion on the format to use:

16. The investigator also shared CCTV footage showing the bank transfer Hussein had received before the attack from a sender in Russia, We know that all five men had spent time in Russia as migrant laborers. They used part of the money to buy a cleaver and knives from this shop:

17. The knife shop owner recognized the picture of Hussein when we showed it to him and explained that Hussein had asked for a sharp knife, and at one point had tested the blade on his own hand, going so far as to pierce the skin and draw a drop of blood:

18. But the most significant piece of evidence was this: Officials shared with us that Hussein had traveled to Syria where he had joined ISIS. This was after months of the government claiming that the attack was carried out not by ISIS but by the IRPT opposition party.

19. I wanted to interview Hussein to understands his role inside the terror group. I'll be back to tell you more, but now an intermission. My new boss was good with this Twitter thing at first, but is now screaming his head off. Back when he conks out:

20. We put in a formal request to interview Hussein in November. We were told we could only do so after his trial was over. I thought I was being blown off & returned to NY. To my surprise, officials contacted us in December just after he was sentenced to say we could see him.

21. But would he agree to be interviewed? Guards refused to allow me to be alone with him and said he had to be handcuffed during the duration of our interview, with two guards resting their hands on each of his shoulders. We had to negotiate to allow him to sit so close to me:

21. But would he agree to be interviewed? Guards consider him dangerous and insisted he needed to remain handcuffed, with a guard on either side of him. We had to negotiate to allow him to sit this close to me. I repeatedly asked him if he was okay being interviewed. He said yes:

22. He told me he had no remorse for what he'd done. That he would kill Jay & Lauren again if given a chance & that he did so on orders from the Islamic State. I asked him if he'd have killed me if he could? He said yes. He began explaining his journey inside ISIS:

23. He says his introduction to extreme Islam began under the tutelage of a man named Qori Nassir, an Islamist cleric whom Hussein met in the 1990s. Qori Nassir used to be a member of the IRPT party, which is how the Tajik government pinned the blame for this attack on the IRPT

24. But being a member of the IRPT in the 1990s means nothing once that person has joined ISIS. (It's like saying that Osama bin Laden was a member of this or that Saudi party before he created al-Qaeda.) Hussein said it was alongside Qori Nassir that he traveled to Syria

25. I was able to factcheck Hussein's claim regarding Qori Nassir's membership in ISIS by going to see Qori Nassir's family in Tajikistan. I met with his first wife who said she'd not heard from him in years and that the government had come to tell her he'd been killed in Syria:

26. I learned that Qori Nassir had a second wife, who had traveled with him to Syria. I met that woman's brother, who said government agents had called him in to tell him that his sister had been detained in Mosul by Iraqi forces during the battle to take back the city from ISIS:

27. To confirm this, I traveled to Iraq but we couldn't find her in any of the prisons. I asked Abu Ali al-Basri, who runs one of the country's leading intelligence agencies, for help. He assigned this agent to the case. She used a dated picture of Qori Nassir's wife to find her:

28. Comparing the photo I provided of the wife, the agent found a woman matching her description in the database of foreign ISIS women held in Iraq. She used a technique involving sketching the outline of her eyes and facial lines on a transparent piece of paper to compare the 2:

29. Using this technique, the agent confirmed that the woman in Iraqi custody was indeed the wife of Qori Nassir & went to speak to her in jail, where the wife confirmed that she and her husband had traveled to Syria and later Iraq to join ISIS. Hussein's information was accurate

30. I spent 4 hours interviewing Hussein. He confirmed that once in Syria he had received military training before fighting on the frontlines for ISIS including in the battle for Tal Afar. He also said that he was involved in recruiting other Russian speakers online.

31. He confirmed he was eventually part of ISIS' external operations branch, the same unit inside ISIS that carried out the Paris and the Brussels attacks. By 2018 as ISIS was losing territory, he says he was dispatched to carry out an attack in Belgium against the EU parliament

32. But he says that in Turkey, he couldn't organize the paperwork to enter Europe, suggesting the EU has finally closed the gaps in its security fabric that were allowing ISIS recruits to travel back from Syria. That's when he says he received orders to return to Tajikistan.

33. His orders were to attack "non-believers." The men parked themselves on the side of the Pamir highway, popular with Western cyclists. The investigation shows that the GPS of the cyclists' phone and the GPS of Hussein's intersected for the 1st time the morning of the attack.

34. The chats on Hussein's phone show that he was trying to send the video of the murder to a man inside ISIS called "Nuhas." He told me he first made contact with Nuhas via Qori Nassir on Telegram. Nuhas was inside Syria when Hussein was dispatched to Tajikistan for the attack:

35. Thank you for joining me tonight. I will be signing off now. The episode is now available to stream on @hulu and @FXNetworks. RIP Jay Austin, Lauren Geoghegan, Renee Wokke and Markus Hummel.