Eliot Higgins has been investigating more than a year on the Malaysia flight MH17 downing in the Ukrainian sky. With its group called Bellingcat he provided the Dutch investigators lots of evidences on Russian responsibility in the death of 298 passengers. And he now says he can release the names of those involved.
Eliot Higgins is kind of a nerd. He’s one of those geeks of the internet that are neither programmers nor hackers, but who spend plenty of hours at the computer. One day Eliot set aside video games and began to spend his time and his energy to chase Russian soldiers active in Ukraine. Bellingcat, the group he founded, is an experience of investigative journalism in the Internet era, a clear demonstration of what can the shared knowledge and crowd-working do when applied to the mass of open source information and social media.
In one of their last scoop, they identify T90 tanks of the 136th motorized brigade of the Russian army employed in battle near Luhansk between August and September 2014. Eliot and his volunteers scanned thousands of images uploaded on social networks by the soldiers themselves, analyzed hundreds profiles on Russian social Vk, following the relations of friendship, comments, extracting geolocation data from the photo. Eventually they managed to collect the ID numbers of each piece of artillery, and the names of most of the soldiers deployed. All of them in active service in the Russian army.
But for more than a year and a half, the obsession of Eliot has been another. Proving Moscow responsibilities in the downing of Malaysia Boeing in the skies of the Donbass on July 17, 2014, while on the ground there was a war which Russia always claimed had nothing to do with.
Since that day, Eliot became Putin’s enemy number one.
MH17
Using their method – and plenty of hours spent in front of computers – Eliot and his group reconstructed beyond reasonable doubt the dynamics of MH17 disaster. They were the first to locate the BUK exact launch site, in a territory controlled by separatists. They debunked all Russian attempts to undermine the facts with false satellite photos and bizarre theories. The results of their investigation were also examined by the Dutch investigators and used in their report. Today Eliot, who collaborates with them full time, says he can release the names of all the Russian servicemen involved in the launch of the BUK missile.
Bellingcat’s investigations start from the Russian base of Kursk, home of the 53rd Air Defense Brigade, from where the BUK convoy leaved to reach the destination of Snizhne, near Donetsk in Ukraine, where the missile was fired.
“We have collected more than a hundred profiles on social media of soldiers of the 53rd Brigade and we were able to rebuild the unit which carried and operated the missile system, establishing who’s who and who was in the convoy that transported the MH17 Buk,” said Eliot in a recent interview with Newsweek .
Based on all the information gathered, concludes Eliot, “we know that at 4:20 pm it launched a surface-to-air missile that hit Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 as it flew over Ukraine. On the morning of July 18, the Buk missile launcher was driven from Luhansk, Ukraine, across the border to Russia”.
Enemy number one
What Eliot discovered is very important. “Soldiers were posting things about each other on social media. They were discussing the work they were doing. They were even posting photographs of their attendance records and roll-call sheets for several months into the summer of 2014,” he said in another interview on German television Deutsche Welle. “We have several commanders – from senior commanders down to brigade commanders, division commanders and unit commanders. There are also the individual soldiers who were operating Buk missile”.
A Buk unit is a convoy made of several trucks. It needs a hundred people to be transported and operated, not to mention all those who just know about it. A maneuver of this kind cannot be decided unless there is an order by the army command. And commanders take their orders from the Russian forces commander in chief, the president of the Federation, Vladimir Putin.
For his work, Eliot became an enemy of Russia. The army of trolls targets him all platforms and social, while the media attack him every day. “We must be causing the Russian media to pull their hair out,” Higgins says, “considering the amount of attention they’re paying to us.”
A great indication of the quality of the work done.
@daniloeliatweet
Eliot Higgins has been investigating more than a year on the Malaysia flight MH17 downing in the Ukrainian sky. With its group called Bellingcat he provided the Dutch investigators lots of evidences on Russian responsibility in the death of 298 passengers. And he now says he can release the names of those involved.
