Here, nighttime imagery from the @NASAEarth VIIRS sensor highlights bright-burning gas flares from oil wells south of Erbil.
This time lapse (captured between 2013 and 2017) also shows the period when ISIS captured Mosul.
@wammezz@oballinger@NASAEarth Gas flares are a major sources of air pollution. Combining VIIRS imagery with @ESA_EO Sentinel-5p data in @googleearth Engine, we can also see high levels of Nitrogen Dioxide around flaring sites, many of which are located near big cities
@wammezz@oballinger@NASAEarth@ESA_EO@googleearth Oil production isn’t the only source of pollution in Iraq. In 2016, ISIS set fire to the Al-Mishraq sulphur plant creating a massive plume of Sulphur Dioxide. Using data from @ECMWF, we show the cloud stretching from Kenya to the Arctic circle, and from Algeria to Japan.
@wammezz@oballinger@NASAEarth@ESA_EO@googleearth@ECMWF@sentinel_hub Reports on leakages in these areas were more than a year old, and publicly available high-res satellite imagery was from 2018. But with help from local sources who traveled to the Kashe industrial district near Dohuk, we were able to photograph and verify ongoing oil spills
The Comité International Pour La Protection Des Droits de L'homme (CIPDH) bills itself as a human rights group with headquarters in Paris. But as @elisethoma5 discovered, this was far from the whole story … bellingcat.com/news/2021/04/1…
@elisethoma5 CIPDH, it transpires, has exaggerated an apparent relationship with the UN, issued what the European Commission describes as “fantasy passports” and even misappropriated the identity of several prominent individuals
@elisethoma5 Until last year, CIPDH stated on its website that it partnered with more than a dozen UN agencies. Yet not one of those agencies said they had heard of CIPDH when contacted by Bellingcat
@PostcodeLoterij Bellingcat has become known for high-profile investigations such as those that looked at the downing of MH17 and the poisoning of Alexey Navalny.
While we will always look to cover important issues such as these, we have big plans to cover more topics and regions.
@PostcodeLoterij The @PostcodeLoterij grant will help us produce more open source reporting on the likes of environmental and wildlife issues.
It will also help us explore how open source evidence can be used in national and international courts, advancing accountability.
Given the canal’s immense strategic importance, the ship’s predicament has attracted the attention of the world’s media.
Satellite imagery from the likes of @sentinel_hub shows the MV Ever Given lodged firmly in the canal. The ship is so big that it can be seen by simply typing “Suez Canal” into the platform's search field
BREAKING - Data freshly obtained by Ukrainian law enforcement and passed on to German investigators backs Bellingcat’s identification of the suspect in the Berlin Tiergarten Park assassination of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili bellingcat.com/news/2021/03/1…
Bellingcat, along with its investigative partners The Insider and Der Spiegel, had previously identified the person suspected in the August 2019 assassination as Vadim Krasikov, who traveled to Berlin under the name of Vadim Sokolov. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
The suspect, currently on trial in Berlin, has continued to insist his real identity is Vadim Sokolov, despite the prosecution stating that his real identity is Vadim Krasikov and that he travelled with fake documents. bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-eu…
Curious to see how online open source evidence could be used in court? So were we, so with @GLAN_LAW and Swansea University School of Law we organised a mock trial featuring @EliotHiggins and @N_Waters89 and real QCs and a real judge to test it out.
The sessions was intended to test whether an open source video of an airstrike in Yemen could be submitted as evidence, and if the testimony of one of our investigators would be accepted by a court.
The intention was to test the open source investigation methodology we had developed as part of our Yemen Project, which we had applied to a number of investigations into Saudi air strikes in Yemen yemen.bellingcat.com