Bellingcat

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

This investigation is a collaboration between Bellingcat and Jeune Afrique. You can read Jeune Afrique’s article in French here. Unexploded Russian-made cluster munition bomblets, as well as damage consistent with bomblet impacts, have been found in a village in northern Mali – despite the West African country being a state party to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) which prohibits their use.  The deployment of cluster munitions in northern Mali was first reported by Radio France I

The fragile ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hezbollah last month is holding.  But satellite imagery shows that at least 46 of 54 towns and villages within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “Yellow Line” in southern Lebanon have been heavily damaged or, in some cases, entirely flattened.  Much of the destruction and demolition has taken place in recent weeks. Bellingcat’s satellite imagery analysis examined towns and villages identified on OpenStreetMap, a community-driven ma

Since the beginning of 2026, at least four landslides are reported to have killed hundreds of people at the Rubaya mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a major global source of coltan. Coltan is widely used in smartphones, laptops and e-vehicles. An estimated 10,000 to 11,000 miners work in treacherous conditions for as little as a few dollars a day. Image: Reuters. With the mines currently under the control of the Rwandan-backed group M23, and access restricted to journalists

This investigation is a collaboration between Bellingcat and Colombian media outlet Cerosetenta. You can read Cerosetenta’s piece in Spanish here. A video posted on Feb. 26 shows several men painting over graffiti in Restrepo, a neighbourhood in Bogota, Colombia, and replacing them with images of their own: a logo used by Colombian political candidate and businessman Jorge Rodriguez, who is one of the men shown in the footage. “Today we are defending public space to stop generating hatred

Bellingcat has identified at least 80 police stations or infrastructure related to law enforcement agencies and the Basij paramilitary group that has been damaged or destroyed in the first three weeks of the United States and Israel’s war against Iran. Experts told Bellingcat that both countries aim to degrade the Iranian regime’s “repressive capacity”. Combined, the US and Israel have conducted thousands of strikes during the course of the 2026 war in Iran. Targets range from Islamic Revolut

The challenges of conducting open-source research in China are well-documented. Consistently named one of the most digitally oppressive countries in the world, China blocks some of the world’s largest social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. Those that are still accessible are mostly Chinese-owned, strictly regulated and monitored in real time by AI systems as well as tens of thousands of “internet police”.  But despite these strict controls, Chinese apps – which bo