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Part two of this investigation should be out early next week, looking at Yevgeny Prigozhin’s history of illegally surveilling, threatening and harassing independent journalists, as well as organised disinformation campaigns targeting journalists bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Internal documents and interviews with former staff members working for Prigozhin's organisations for the first time reveal specific plans for campaigns against individual journalists and news organisations.
We'll also look at the disinformation campaign by RIA FAN against Bellingcat that had Prigozhin's direct involvement, triggered by the investigations in Prigozhin we're publishing at the moment. It's all gone a bit meta.
The third part will likely be out at the end of the week, hopefully along with a super special announcement.
So far our reporting on Prizoghin has led to his troll factory site RIA FAN publishing multiple articles based on fabricated direct messages from Bellingcat employees, and a rather bizarre roundtable discussion....
At that roundtable Prizoghin was joined by everyone indicted by Robert Mueller over Russian interference in the 2016 election to complain about Bellingcat, particularly referencing the RIA FAN stories based on faked DMs.
riafan.ru/1299089-vmesha…
Yesterday they also faked a bunch of DMs from the @Bellingchat WhatsApp number, again claiming we were trying to bribe and threaten their staff riafan.ru/1302373-bellin…
Then they got the head of the Fund for the Protection of National Values ​​(FZNTs) Alexander Malkevich to say media should be punished for collaborating with Bellingcat.
riafan.ru/1302486-malkev…
All of this actually helps demonstrate a key premise of our upcoming article, and helps give a sense of shameless and murky world of Prigozhin and his ilk.
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Eliot Higgins
@EliotHiggins
THREAD - Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman gave one of their notorious press conferences today, where they yet again accused a public figure of a terrible crime, this time @JoeNBC. The accuser was Mark Hoffman, but there was something wrong with "Mark".
archive.fo/S0qpH
Mark couldn't attend the Wohl-Burkman press event in person, and had some technical issues that meant he wasn't able to appear on video as promised, only audio. After examining his Twitter account it became clear this wasn't an accident.
Bellingcat's @arictoler noticed a few problem with Mark Hoffman's face, clear signs it had been generated by thispersondoesnotexist.com, a website for making fake faces from scratch
Read 12 tweets
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Eliot Higgins
@EliotHiggins
Thread - The OPCW IIT report is just out, as suspected it focuses on the March 24th, 25th, and 30th 2017 chlorine and Sarin attacks in Al-Lataminah. The report concludes Syrian government forces were responsible for all three attacks.
opcw.org/sites/default/…
The report also confirms the use of M4000 bombs in the March 24th and March 30th attack. Bellingcat had previously identified the M4000 bomb as the type used in the March 30th attack based on careful examination of open source evidence bellingcat.com/news/mena/2019…
Unsurprisingly the IIT says the Syrian Arab Republic wasn't much of a help in the investigations.
Read 58 tweets
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Eliot Higgins
@EliotHiggins
Three years since the Khan Sheikhoun Sarin attack we should take some time to remember one of the worst examples of mainstream reporting on the attack; Seymour Hersh's article published by @welt, something they've never apologised for bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017…
Hersh's claim, "Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives", was shown to be a complete fabrication by the OPCW-UN JIM, and not even supported by the Russian and Syrian claims.
Hersh wrote this supposed Russian bomb destroyed the target, releasing a cloud of chemicals "formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement". This was complete nonsense, with Sarin detected in multiple samples from Khan Sheikhoun.
Read 5 tweets

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