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“Now we can say exactly that there is a serial killer in Moscow. Whether the task of killing is given by the FSB or the Kremlin is a philosophical question to debate.
That serial killer is not working with his own hands, but with the help of state structures maintained with taxpayer money.
In my opinion, the world has not seen this level of assassinations since Stalin, ”emphasized the founder of Bellingcat at a conference organized by the KW Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University in the United States.
SWNS.com nuotr./Christo Grozevas
Spread the behind-the-scenes work of Bellingcat
Speaking at the conference, Ch. Grozev described in detail the course of the investigation, which revealed the A.Navnas poisoners.
He recalled another notorious cursory investigation by Bellingcat, in which 12 people who had contributed to the downing of the Malaysian passenger jet MH-17 were made public, and admitted that this time it was not just official sources that had to be seized.
“At the time we were investigating Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict, which ended with the downing of an MH-17 passenger plane, we were working mainly with open-access sources. For example, Russian soldiers in a certain location took photos on mobile phones and posted them on social media, leaving all the metadata.
Reuters / Photo by Scanpix / Plane shot down by terrorists
However, the Russian authorities soon banned the use of mobile phones by soldiers. This is one of the examples of how access to open source data has become increasingly difficult for us, especially when investigating state crimes, ”said Chrozev.
In investigating the A. Navaln poisoning, he used surface sources, not just open sources.
For example, information on the travel of suspects over the last decade was acquired on the black market.
The researcher also admits that other data was bought on the black market: calls, telephone geolocations, mergers.
Investigators even bought this confidential data from police officers, who sell the information available on the black market through so-called “data brokers.”
YouTube Photo / Alexei Navaln is taken to Omsk Hospital
Chrozev said that when buying data on the black market, the researchers followed certain principles.
In particular, they bought data on individual phone numbers from different merchants who were unaware of the larger context.
Each piece of data obtained was purchased from several independent sources to see if the information matched.
A Bellingcat researcher admits that a few years ago, they had access to a comprehensive database of all passenger flights in Russia and their passengers from 2014 to 2017, about 75 million. airline tickets sold during that period.
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