Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins on Reinventing Reporting

ELIOT HIGGINS, FOUNDER, BELLINGCAT: Well, I mean, it’s been really shocking for us to discover, through our investigations, just how many assassinations have been done in Russia by the FSB using these nerve agents. We have just published a report looking at three more assassinations that involve the same FSB team that targeted Navalny. And these were actually successful assassinations. And, really, what was shocking for us there were, these were not big political figures. These were local activists. And the fact that the Russian government is quite frequently using this, by the looks at from the information we’re finding — and it’s not just these we’re looking — really shocks us. And we’re hoping that the Russian people are seeing this and questioning why their government needs to be targeting activist political opposition figures for assassination with what is an illegal nerve agent program.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: So, talk to me a little bit more about that, because you said it’s not the first that you have outed. And, obviously, you discovered the Skripal — the people who tried to kill the Skripals with the same Novichok. Talk to me how — what went — because you use a lot of public source information. How did you do that, and lead the trail back to the Kremlin?

HIGGINS: So, we are using something called open source information, which is publicly available information. But Russia is rather unique in that it’s a police state, but it’s an incredibly corrupt police state. So, you can go online, if you know the right places to look. I’m not talking about the Dark Web. I’m talking just normal Internet forums. You find people who are brokers for information, things like travel records, phone records. And we basically collected that and a huge amount of other data from previously leaked databases. And we could use that information to start identifying some of these suspects, first with the Skripal poisoning, where we identified the two GRU officers who were involved. Later, we linked the same GRU unit to a previous nerve-agent-based assassination attempt in Bulgaria. That then connected us to — through their communication records, to scientists working in chemical labs in Russia, many of whom were members of the previous Novichok program that was supposedly shut down. But we discovered they actually moved on to supposedly making sports nutrition drinks, but clearly were still working on these nerve agents. And we discovered after Navalny was poisoned that they had been in contact with an FSB team. And by getting those phone records, travel records and other details, we discovered that this team had followed Navalny on 40 different incidents. And on some of those journeys, he and his wife actually was — fell ill in July of last year. He then fell in ill and August. And we have discovered since then that many of these journeys of this FSB team overlap with other unusual deaths and illnesses of figures.