Thread by @bellingcat

After the publication of the report by @bellingcat, @the_ins_ru & @spiegel showing FSB’s poison squad tailed @vkaramurza before both of his poisonings, he has been subject of renewed tailing - this time by a car we linked to the FSB.

Yesterday, @vkaramurza reported he was tailed throughout Moscow by the same car. Following his decision to switch to public transport, he noticed the same people trailing on the metro as well. He sent us a photo of the car that tailed him.

We tried to search for the car number plate in a number of online sources that almost always return car ownership and registration data. Nothing came back for this car... a very unusual occurrence.

Then we searched for the car license plate among photographs of cars on @google and @yandex. Bingo! We found this one match. Same car model, same color, same license plate number. But where is it parked?

We decided to geolocate the street address and see if it gives us any clue as to the owner of the mysterious car. To do this, we took the most distinctive piece of the street landscape, and did a reverse search for it. We got a match. Ilinka St. 4-8 in Moscow.

This location is close to too many government buildings to decipher whom the car was visiting: FSB’s HQ is just around the corner, as is the anti-terrorism center and a number of ministries. So we decided to check the actual, official registration data for the car.

We got a response from a source with access to the live car-registration database: it’s a special “moveable” license plate number from a series belonging to the FSB. There is no actual physical car attached to it. It’s an FSB car. Tailing @vkaramurza - again.

Oops, wrong number in the AVInfoBot screenshot -- here is the correct one (same result)

@derspiegel* of course. That's what we get for drafting a tweet thread outside of Twitter and not double-checking the handles.