Last year documents were leaked from the OPCW accompanied by claims from a former OPCW employee “Alex”, that the OPCWs Douma report was “doctored”.
We've obtained correspondence which proves Alex’s claims are wrong and that no such "doctoring" took place. bellingcat.com/news/mena/2020…
This correspondence is from the OPCW Director General, Fernando Arias, to Brendan Whelan (a.k.a Alex) who had raised concerns about the report.
It lays out the reasoning behind the report’s conclusions, including scientific methods that were developed after Whelan left the OPCW.
The correspondence makes clear that the conclusions of the OPCW report are entirely consistent with the evidence, and that the environmental samples collected from Douma provided information consistent with the use of chlorine gas as a chemical weapon.
It also notes that both Russia and Syria privately agreed with these findings.
This is in stark contrast to their public claims, which maintain that a huge conspiracy somehow faked these attacks, apparently including samples for scientific methods that didn’t yet exist.
Despite this clear explanation, Whelan decided to leak significant documents to @wikileaks and others.
We @bellingcat previously pointed out these documents were only a small part of the picture, and that important information was clearly being excluded from the leaks.
The reply from the OPCW DG was never published: either Whelan never leaked it, or those who published these leaks, such as @wikileaks, chose not to.
In either case this decision deliberately excluded a vital part of the story that clearly demonstrates Whelan’s claims were wrong.
We asked those who were involved in publishing and writing about these leaks for comment.
@aaronjmate replied "As a general rule, I do not comment that I may have or have not received, but have never written about. I have never written about the document you refer to."
@ClarkeMicah of the Mail On Sunday (@MailOnline) did not reply to requests for comment, despite the DG's letter having been mentioned by Whelan in one of @ClarkeMicah's blogs.
And, rather unsurprisingly, @wikileaks did not reply to requests for comment either.
It was always apparent from the evidence presented that the idea of a "Douma coverup" was fundamentally flawed and relied on questionable claims.
This letter shows there was a clear attempt to obscure the truth of what happened in Douma on 7th April 2018.
@ClarkeMicah of the Mail On Sunday (@mailonline) did not reply to requests for comment, despite the DG's letter having been mentioned by Whelan in one of @clarkemicah's blogs.
And, rather unsurprisingly, @wikileaks did not reply to requests for comment either.
It was always apparent from the evidence presented that the idea of a "Douma coverup" was fundamentally flawed and relied on questionable claims.
We've published a new, major investigation (along with @the_ins_ru, @derspiegel, and @SvobodaRadio) into the cooperation between the GRU's military unit 29155 and two research centers to develop and deploy chemical weapons -- including Novichok. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
We've acquired the phone logs for a number of officers with the GRU's unit 29155, including Andrei Averyanov. A number that kept popping up on these logs was that of Sergey Chepur -- a 50-year old military doctor and expert in extreme toxicology.
Sergey Chepur is the director of the St. Petersburg State Institute for Experimental Military Medicine of the Min. of Defense. Phone logs show that he would make a number of calls to GRU officers right before a number of key operations, including the poisoning of Sergey Skripal.
In a joint investigation with @LHReports@DerSpiegel@ARDde@tv_asahi_news and research and reporting by @EmmanFre, we have uncovered evidence that the European border force @Frontex is complicit in illegal “pushback” operations in the Aegean.
Pushbacks are when refugees and migrants are forced back over a border without consideration of individual circumstances & without possibility to apply for asylum or appeal.
We have previously written about one such pushback in detail.
The U.S. Justice Department charged six Russians with hacking charges last week, accusing them of working for the GRU. Turns out, three of these hackers registered their car to the same imaginary apartment in Moscow... along with 46 other people. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Vehicle registration databases for the Moscow oblast leak regularly, making it easy to check residential data. If you search for three of these hackers, you see that they "live" at Svobody 21, apartment V (В in Russian). The problem: this apartment doesn't exist.
Svobody 21 is the address of military unit 74455 -- the GRU hacking unit involved in a number of high-profiled cyberattacks, including against the OPCW, Macron campaign, and others. 49 Russians registered their vehicles to apartments В and ВЧ (short for "military unit").
Anatoly Shariy (@anatoliisharii) responded to our investigation. He maintains that he had received the Bezler files from an anonymous source & stated “I don't care about the source, I gave a more complete record than the one that was published by the SBU” bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/1…
Shariy also wrote that he received the full recording of the Geranin conversation, but left out the part about the shelling of Rozivka because he believed it was “insignificant”.
He subsequently shared a video of him playing the full recording on his computer which revealed that his file was the same size and carried the same filename as the one that Bezler emailed to a high ranking GRU official and to a Russian lawyer from the law firm Ivanyan & Partners
In our new MH17 article, we revisit the recordings with Russian DNR commander Igor Bezler that previously linked him to the MH17 downing. We examined new unpublished intercepts, Bezler’s unpublished testimony, and new information introduced at the trial. bellingcat.com/news/2020/10/1…
The Dutch prosecution had revealed new details about the so-called “birdie conversation” in which Bezler subordinate Stelmakh informs Bezler that it was observed how a birdie (a plane) flew in his direction shortly before the MH17 downing. MH17 flew on a similar path.
It turns out that birdie conversation was recorded just short of two minutes before the MH17 downing, which has cast doubt on the theory that it concerned MH17 or contributed to the downing–reasons why Bezler has not been indicted.