Bellingcat

This article is the result of a collaboration with The Sunday Times. You can find their corresponding piece here.  Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. Crime boss Christy Kinahan leads a $1.5 billion illicit network involved in drug trafficking, money laundering and arms smuggling from the cartel’s base in Dubai. Christy Kinahan, the Irish founder of the Kinahan Organised Crime Group who is being pursued by authorities around

Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. WARNING: This report contains links to graphic images and footage. A joint Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique investigation into drone strikes carried out by the Malian military adds new details about the attacks which frequently are carried out in civilian areas and have reportedly resulted in the deaths of civilians. The incidents, concentrated in northern Mali, often involved

Guess what? Bellingcat is finally launching an official merch line! That’s right: after years of fantasizing and wishing, we’re finally ready to get our name and logo on cool merch that you’ll be able to show off. We’re working with a high quality, sustainable merchandising company to make all kinds of cool swag: coffee cups, caps, t-shirts, hoodies, and more! We want your help designing the merch! It’s not a Bellingcat project if it doesn’t involve you, our community, and our official

Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. Illustration by Oisín Mac Con Iomaire On a June night in 1996, in a basement apartment in Boston’s Chinatown, a killer put a pistol to the back of a young man’s head and pulled the trigger. The victim’s body was wrapped in quilts, lowered into the trunk of a car and driven about 20 miles southwest of the city, where it was dumped in the woods. It lay undiscovered th

Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. A sanctioned vessel that was previously reported to have transported weapons destined for Russian mercenaries has been traversing ports on the west coast of Africa since March, exhibiting what experts told Bellingcat  was an unusual set of movements and behaviours. Patria (IMO: 9159921) has been sanctioned by the US, Ukraine and Canada. Support Bellingcat Your d

Sign up here to receive Bellingcat’s biggest investigations by email as soon as they are published. Satellite images obtained and analysed by Bellingcat show over five miles of new road constructed in Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas, part of a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “Smart Wall” installation, which includes roads, barriers, lighting and cameras.  The project was paused earlier this week after pushback from local residents, politicians and

This article is the result of a collaboration with The Sunday Times. You can find their corresponding piece here. The Kinahan cartel, led by Christy Kinahan (centre) and his sons Christopher Jr (left) and Daniel (right), controls one of the most powerful transnational crime groups in the world from the Emirates. Source: Supplied A key leader of the Kinahan cartel who is wanted by authorities around the world and has been living in hiding in Dubai for a decade has just had his Emirates resid

Cristiano Ronaldo during Portugal’s losing game against Spain earlier this month. Source: Imagn Images via Reuters Connect Football fans wagered more than US $14 billion on the FIFA World Cup through prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, a Bellingcat analysis has found. Support Bellingcat Your donations directly contribute to our ability to publish groundbreaking investigations and uncover wrongdoing around the world. Donate On the crypto-based Polymarket, which provides

Bellingcat has geolocated footage showing Shahed-136 type kamikaze drones in operation in Mali. Defence Blog and France 24 previously published reports that these drones were being deployed on the battlefield in northern Mali. But Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique subsequently verified two recent strikes using geolocation, satellite imagery and expert analysis to provide some of the clearest open-source evidence to date documenting their deployment. The two strikes took place in the villages o

This investigation is a collaboration between Bellingcat and New Zealand news site The Press. You can read The Press’ piece here.  Content warning: This article discusses non-consensual sexually explicit content and child sexual abuse material. In 2024, a former track and field coach in Boston, Massachusetts, was sentenced to five years in jail for attempting to trick and extort more than 100 women, including student-athletes he coached, into sending him intimate photos. 

Bellingcat has geolocated footage circulating on social media that appears to show coffins placed in newly dug trenches following the recent deadly earthquakes in Venezuela. The site identified extends over two hectares beside an existing cemetery in La Esperanza, a town near La Guaira on the country’s northern coast. It was visited by a representative of our Latin American reporting partners who captured pictures of work ongoing at the site. They also report speaking to a resident w

If you’ve seen reports of a wildfire in your region and you’re looking for open source data, NASA’s fire-tracking tool is often the first place to start. It provides a heat signature and an approximate location. But detection is only the first step in understanding what’s happened. In this guide, we explore ways to analyse and report on the scale and severity of wildfires, including those in protected areas where ecosystems are often most fragile. We also examine how often fires recur in the sam

At least 1,719 people are reported to have died after two devastating earthquakes struck northwestern Venezuela last week. The final casualty count is expected to rise significantly. Some media outlets report resident’s growing frustration with the Venezuelan government and its recovery efforts. Sky News on June 29 reported that the United Nations Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in Venezuela was preparing for as many as 10,000 deaths.  Social media posts, news reports and d

This article is the result of a collaboration with The Sunday Times. You can find their corresponding piece here. https://www.bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2026/06/1aa_Vid_Top_dixon062026.mp4 Every Friday evening, the brochure says, players can compete to win cash prizes in one of the world’s fastest-growing racquet sports. The padel club in Dubai’s west is the picture of modern wellness culture: climate-controlled courts, a private sauna and ice bath, and one-on-one coaching. The

Between February 2022 and September 2025, Bellingcat staff and volunteers collected, geolocated, and shared more than 2,500 incidents of civilian harm following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  As part of this effort, Bellingcat tested a new machine learning model intended to rank Telegram social media posts on their likelihood of containing incidents of civilian harm.  This novel methodology dramatically reduced the search and selection time required, freeing researcher

Warning: Includes graphic descriptions of animal harm and images of animal parts from the outset. A Bellingcat investigation has uncovered a Myanmar-based wildlife trafficker who has operated openly across social media for at least six years, claiming to have sold tiger bones, rhino horn, elephant skin and other products from protected and endangered species to customers in Myanmar, China and Thailand. By analysing hundreds of adverts and customer conversations, Bellingcat traced more than

This article was co-published with Signal Ohio and STAT. In high school, Ashley Delgado dreamed of becoming a doctor and one day buying her father a Rolls-Royce. “She wanted to heal people,” said her father, James Taylor. She had a high GPA, Taylor added, and did especially well in science and Latin. In her mid-20s, Ashley suffered a leg injury and was prescribed OxyContin. The painkiller marked the beginning of a yearslong descent through addiction — from prescription opioids to methamph

On February 15, 2026, the bulk carrier, Grumant (IMO: 9385879) was pictured at the occupied Ukrainian Port of Feodosia on the Crimean peninsula. Satellite imagery suggests it had already been there for several days.  It appeared to stock up on grain before departing on a two-month-long journey eventually docking at the Port of Benghazi in Libya on April 18. While there have been previous reports of grain shipments from occupied Ukraine arriving in Libya, this is only the second time a Ru

“In the age of misinformation, the line between fact and fiction is blurrier than ever.” “For those of us working in video news, verification isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a necessity. It is how we protect the stories we help shape and how we earn and maintain trust in an increasingly chaotic information ecosystem,” Abu Dhabi-registered video news agency Viory posted on LinkedIn on April 9, 2026, offering training to help newsrooms and journalists sort fact from fiction.  The

A “river of blood” was how one survivor described the scene in western Myanmar. “I saw shooting. I saw mass killing.” Another told the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHRC) how 20 relatives, including three children, had been killed in the 2024 attack on Htan Shauk Khan village. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said earlier this month that the Arakan Army (AA) “may have killed at least 170 Rohingya men, women, and children” in Hoyyar Siri (known as Htan Shauk Khan in Burmese