logo
ENFRع
#

Latest news with #Bellingcat

Putin ‘ultimately to blame' for snuffing out 298 lives on downed MH17
Putin ‘ultimately to blame' for snuffing out 298 lives on downed MH17

Metro

time17-07-2025

  • Politics
  • Metro

Putin ‘ultimately to blame' for snuffing out 298 lives on downed MH17

Vladimir Putin ultimately bears responsibility for the downing of MH17 by Russian proxy forces over eastern Ukraine 11 years ago, a leading investigative journalist has said. Eliot Higgins spoke on the anniversary of the shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet with the loss of all 298 people onboard, including 10 British citizens. The crime was one of the grim milestones in a pattern of hybrid military aggression that tested the West's resolve and ultimately resulted in the all-out attack on Ukraine. Among those being remembered today is Richard Mayne, 20, a student who was on his way to Australia to begin studying as part of his University of Leeds course. Russians Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Ukrainian pro-Moscow separatist Leonid Kharchenko have been handed life sentences over the atrocity by the District Court of the Hague but remain at large because Russia refuses to surrender them. Higgins, who founded Bellingcat, was among the open-source investigators who unravelled the circumstances of the tragedy amid a fog of disinformation emerging from Russia. He told Metro: 'Dubinsky and Kharchenko have been pretty quiet in the last few years, unlike Girkin. 'Girkin posted a lot of statements online that criticised Russia's military performance in Ukraine following the 2022 invasion, which resulted in him being imprisoned for four years in 2024 by the Russian government on extremism charges. 'I suspect he would have had an easier time in a Dutch prison. 'As for the responsibility of Putin and the Kremlin, it's clear that Putin allowed the transfer of heavy weapon systems from Russia into Ukraine, so while there's nothing to indicate he ordered MH17 to be shot down, he does bear responsibility for allowing those weapons to be sent to Eastern Ukraine along with Russian soldiers, both in terms of the attack on MH17, and the broader loss of life in the conflict.' Richard's dad Simon has spoken of the day he waved his son off at Birmingham Airport in what would be the last time they saw each other. His son, heading for a year studying in Australia, was due to fly to Amsterdam to catch MH17 onwards to Kuala Lumpur. But as the Boeing 777 travelled over the breakaway Donbas region of eastern Ukraine it was struck by a ground-to-air missile fired by separatists. The Hague-decreed act of murder on July 17, 2014, also claimed the life of Loughborough University student Ben Pocock, 20, from Bristol. Aside from the UK victims, 196 were Dutch with many from other countries, including 43 from Malaysia and 38 from Australia. Eighty were children. Bodies and wreckage landed in fields of sunflowers — which have become a symbol of the tragedy — near Hrabove in the area seized by the rebels. Bellingcat gathered a plethora of time-stamped evidence, including photographs and videos, to show that a Buk missile launcher was transported through the so-called Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) on the day before the jet was shot down. The weapons system was operated by the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade, according to the researchers, who, along with other open source investigators, found images of it in transport. According to Dutch prosecutors, separatists in an agricultural field near the city of Snizhe in Donetsk congratulated each other after firing the missile, believing they had shot down an enemy aircraft. The Hague subsequently sentenced separatist military leader Girkin, commanding officer Dubinsky and executive commander Kharchenko to life imprisonment for murder in absentia and ordered their arrests after the district court trial concluded in November 2022. The court found they had caused 'devastating destruction' with 'unforeseeably serious consequences for the relatives.' The verdicts helped counter disinformation emanating from Russia about how the plane was downed, including alleged eyewitnesses who saw Ukrainian fighter jets in the vicinity at the time the missile was fired. The attempt to pin the blame on Kyiv contradicted earlier Russian media reports about the downing of a Ukrainian military aircraft. 'It gives [the victims' families] a sense of closure, that there's been a serious effort to establish the truth, and that there are convictions based on a thorough legal process,' Higgins said of the verdicts. 'With the amount of disinformation that was pumped out about MH17, having those official investigations helps them draw a line under events, rather than it feeling like an open question that propagandists are happy to answer with their own theories.' The verdicts were followed by the European Court of Human Rights ruling on July 9 that Russia is responsible for the loss of the plane. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the ruling as 'null and void', according to the Kommersant newspaper. The judgement made in Strasbourg is largely symbolic as Russia broke with the court in 2022 and had prior not been complying with its rulings, although it was hailed as 'historic and unprecedented' by Ukraine. More than a decade on, the search for justice continues as Putin pursues his murderous full-blown attack on Ukraine and 'grey zone' tactics across Europe and the UK. In the Netherlands, families of the victims want the wreckage to serve as a reminder for future generations. A national monument already exists near Schiphol Airport. Higgins said: 'Following the convictions in the Dutch MH17 trial and the verdict at the European Court of Human Rights, there is still an ongoing case in the US where the family of a victim was recently given permission to go ahead and sue a Russian bank for enabling separatists in eastern Ukraine to continue their war, which resulted in MH17 being shot down. 'There's also an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about what to do with the wreckage. Some families are hoping for the creation of a museum to house the wreckage and tell the MH17 story for future generations.' Echoes of MH17 reverberated in the Azerbaijan Airlines crash that killed 38 people on Christmas Day. A Russian missile is thought to have brought down the plane as it tried to land at Grozny in Chechnya. Moscow said at the time that an investigation was taking place and it would be 'incorrect to make any hypotheses' before it concludes. Higgins does not see any clear lines connecting the two incidents but does believe there is a lesson for history in the puzzle he helped to solve. More Trending 'I think these incidents are different enough that there's no real pattern behind them, beyond the incompetence of the people operating the missile systems for the shootdown,' he said. 'MH17 was significant because it shows what happens when the West accepts lies told to them by authoritarian regimes in the name of diplomacy. Any authoritarian regime will continue to push at the boundaries of what's acceptable, so they know how much they can get away with before a significant reaction. 'With MH17 the failure to respond firmly to Russia's secret invasion of Ukraine set up the circumstances for the shooting down of MH17, and eventually the official invasion of Ukraine in 2022.' Do you have a story you would like to share? Contact MORE: Coalition that's recording each Russian war crime ready for Putin's day of reckoning MORE: Alexander Litvinenko predicted 'Ukraine will suffer' at the hands of 'Putin the hooligan' MORE: Dad of British man killed on downed MH17 recalls final goodbye at the airport

Deadly opioid 40 times more powerful than fentanyl smuggled into Canada inside PlayStations, basketballs
Deadly opioid 40 times more powerful than fentanyl smuggled into Canada inside PlayStations, basketballs

CBC

time20-06-2025

  • CBC

Deadly opioid 40 times more powerful than fentanyl smuggled into Canada inside PlayStations, basketballs

Social Sharing The video call is grainy, but it's crystal clear what the person on the phone is trying to sell: illicit drugs, packaged and ready to be shipped to Canada. The seller, who goes by the name Kim, says he sells cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and nitazenes, a powerful class of synthetic opioids most people have never heard of — but which can be up to 43 times more powerful than fentanyl. "It can kill people, right? So, I just want to make sure that you know that," the CBC journalist asks in a secretly recorded phone call. "That is the game," the seller replies. The seller is one of the 14 people the CBC's visual investigation unit spoke to in text messages and phone calls after finding them through ads posted by users on major social media platforms such as LinkedIn, X and Reddit and e-commerce websites advertising nitazenes for sale. WATCH | How synthetic opioids get into Canada: Worse than fentanyl: How smugglers get a new, deadly drug into Canada 2 minutes ago Duration 5:37 A CBC News visual investigation tracks how deadly and super-potent synthetic opioids called nitazenes make their way into Canada, where they have killed hundreds of people. With open source support from investigators at Bellingcat, CBC finds hundreds of ads for nitazenes online, posted to social media and e-commerce sites, and talks to the sellers behind them to expose how these deadly drugs get smuggled to Canada. These ads, posted in the open, contain contact information that put CBC in touch with drug dealers who claim to be part of international criminal networks. CBC did not purchase any illegal substances. Nitazenes, which have never been approved for medical use and are Schedule 1 drugs under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, have increasingly been turning up in drug busts across Canada. Last year, two lab busts in Quebec alone may have accounted for more than a million counterfeit pharmaceutical oxycodone pills, which were actually protonitazepyne, a type of nitazene — or "analog" — according to the RCMP. Nitazenes have killed hundreds of Canadians over the past four years, according to data collected by CBC's visual investigations unit from coroners across the country. "[North Americans] not only are the largest consumers of nitazines, but really have the biggest problem as it relates to the number of deaths," said Alex Krotulski, director of the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education in Pennsylvania, a toxicology lab that tests for nitazenes in Canada and the U.S. "This is really becoming an established drug class of novel synthetic opioids." A more potent high Nitazenes aren't nearly as popular as fentanyl and its analogs, but they offer a more potent high, making them appealing to drug dealers. Drug users might not even know they're consuming nitazenes, which can be laced into counterfeit pills. "It makes me angry," said Montreal resident Christian Boivin after CBC shared its findings with him. Boivin's 15-year-old son Mathis died of a nitazene overdose last year after consuming what he thought were oxycodone pills. "[These sellers] don't have a conscience. They're bad people and they just want money… they don't care about lives." Mathis's story isn't an isolated case. Because public-facing statistics group them as "non-fentanyl opioids," CBC reached out to coroners in all 13 provinces and territories to compile data on the total number of deaths from nitazenes in Canada. The data received was incomplete — for example, Manitoba only provided statistics for 2024 — but indicates there have been nearly 400 deaths directly attributed to nitazenes or suspected to involve nitazenes since 2021. The true number of deaths is likely even higher. "I guarantee you because of the variability in toxicology testing, the variability in practices and variability in funding availability… [the number of deaths] is underreported," said Donna Papsun, a forensic toxicologist at Pennsylvania-based NMS Labs, which tests samples from across Canada. "If they're not looking for it, you can't find it." Going by the available data, the most deaths were in Alberta, with 121 since 2021, followed by Quebec with 91 and B.C. with 81. "We're worried that this will continue to rise as an ongoing threat," said Dan Anson, director general of intelligence and investigations for the Canada Border Services Agency. Sellers reveal how they smuggle drugs One of the ways that nitazenes make their way into Canada is through sellers who advertise on social media networks by posting images of powders overlaid with contact information. "Online ads are how this market functions right now," Anson told CBC. CBC's visual investigations unit, with support from open-source investigators at Bellingcat, found hundreds of ads in user-generated posts for more than a dozen types of nitazenes on social media platforms, including X, Reddit, LinkedIn, Behance (a graphic design website owned by Adobe), and e-commerce websites in India such as Exporters India, Dial4trade and TradeIndia. They surfaced by the dozens in Google image searches for keywords related to nitazene analogs. It often took mere minutes to receive a reply after responding to an online ad. Sellers were quick to share videos of their labs and products, even offering a step-by-step guide on how they would ship the drugs to Canada: first, by mislabelling the packages, then by concealing them inside PlayStation 5s, deflated basketballs, teapots and Chinese herbal packages. They would then be shipped via courier or the mail. Previous reporting on the topic in the U.K. even had the drugs hidden in dog food and catering supplies. One seller told a CBC reporter that shipments of nitazene could even be delivered the same day from Detroit, Mich., to Windsor, Ont. Platforms respond to CBC's questions on nitazene ads: "You'll see some pretty bizarre levels of creativity when it comes to importing illegal drugs," said Anson. "They're coming from online marketplaces ... and they're going to come through postal courier." When reached by CBC for comment, LinkedIn, Reddit and Adobe removed the posts containing ads that were flagged. X did not respond to a request for comment and the flagged posts were still live at the time of publishing. A Google spokesperson said it complies with valid legal removal requests from the public and authorities. Dial4Trade and Exporters India, two India-based e-commerce platforms where ads were found, told CBC they added restrictions to block nitazene ads. TradeIndia, another platform, said it removed the flagged ads. A global network It became clear that sellers of nitazenes are spread across the globe, and aren't always who or where they purport to be online. On the e-commerce site TradeIndia, next to the heading "Etonitazene Powder," was a picture of a brown powder offered by a Chinese biotech company. On its website, the company states "nothing is above the human health." It has an address listed in Shanghai that doesn't exist on Google Maps. But the company was quick to explain why the address didn't exist when asked in a secretly recorded phone call. "It's very dangerous to sell in China," a man who went by Jerry told a CBC reporter during a call with a Mandarin translator. Jerry said he and his partners needed a fake address to make the company seem real, but also so they couldn't be discovered by Chinese authorities. Videos inside overseas drug labs To show they were legitimate distributors, they shared videos from their lab — and said the name of the CBC reporter and the date to prove the video's authenticity — and showed us past shipments to Canada. They even offered to send samples of nitazenes for free to test for purity. But the sellers weren't just from China. CBC spoke to sellers who claimed to ship from the U.S., the U.K., India, even the Philippines. Over video, one seller who said they're from the U.K. showed shipment records that he said were for drugs going to Grande Prairie, Alta. Like any global trade, some nitazene sellers said they were struggling with the impact of U.S. tariffs. A person representing a company called Umesh Enterprises that claimed to be based out of India said nitazenes are "coming from India.... due to the issues going on between the U.S. and China with the tariffs," they said during a call. "There's been a lot of blockage from China so…. we go with India." The speaker, like many of the sellers, acknowledged that importing nitazenes to Canada is illegal and knew how lethal these synthetic opioids can be. "[These sellers] don't care how many people they take down or how many families they hurt," said Toronto resident Dale Sutherland, whose 22-year-old son Corey died from an overdose involving a nitazene in 2022. "It's very frustrating…. we have to have more regulations, more strict penalties." In response to CBC's findings, Canada's fentanyl czar, Kevin Brosseau, said in a statement the "emergence of nitazenes, and other highly potent synthetic opioids, is something I am concerned about and am taking very seriously." Brosseau pointed to the federal government's recently tabled Bill C-2, or Strong Borders Act, which will give Canada Post more authority to open mail and remove barriers to law enforcement inspecting mail during an investigation. Critics of the proposed act demanded the complete withdrawal of Bill C-2, warning it would expand government surveillance.

Why Clarkson's cracks about Scotland make him a bloody idiot
Why Clarkson's cracks about Scotland make him a bloody idiot

The Herald Scotland

time22-05-2025

  • Politics
  • The Herald Scotland

Why Clarkson's cracks about Scotland make him a bloody idiot

The expression "word salad" is often linked to disordered discourse. Eliot Higgins, who runs the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, has been discussing it, and seems to be on to something. We talk about living in the post-truth age. Indeed, we've transited through the post-truth age to the post-reality age where disparate groups share no common ground. The death of any shared reality reveals itself in thoughts and ideas – discourse – which seem truly bizarre, or disordered. We hear comments today that frankly would have seen you jeered from the public stage a decade ago. The disorder is a two-way street afflicting both left and right. No group is immune as the very nature of being in a group today – a hard-delineated political subset fixed around identity – means estrangement from all other groups. Estrangement causes derangement, perhaps. The left is guilty, certainly, though it's on the ascendant right where you'll find discourse that's truly disordered. Read more by Neil Mackay Among the left, it's primarily on the swivel-eyed fringes where you'll hear people claim that songs like Walk Like An Egyptian by The Bangles are acts of cultural appropriation, or that The Tempest subjects audiences to colonial trauma (in fact, if you've studied the play, it's more accurately interpreted as Shakespeare's critique of colonialism). On the right, though, grotesque exaggeration, thin-skinned fragility and wild demonisation of opponents is now commonplace. Check any internet message board – even computer game forums, for pity's sake – if you're in doubt. Both sides behave deleteriously towards democracy, but the greater danger lies firmly to the right. Given we now live in a world that's more ridiculous than sublime, it's unsurprising to find Jeremy Clarkson emerging as the zeitgeisty exemplar of disordered discourse. Clarkson, a newspaper commentator, chose to describe the SNP's scrapping of peak rail fares as 'communism'. Clarkson regularly boasts about his terrible A-level results, so history and political science were clearly not his strengths. In theory, communism heralds a workers' utopia. I struggle to see how tweaking train prices ushers in an era of universal brotherly love and income equality. In practice, communism involves marching your opponents into the gulag and shooting them in the head for thought-crime. I'm pretty sure this hasn't happened in Scotland. Evidently, blokey old Jeremy will say it's just the bantz. He's only having a larf, isn't he? Well, yes and no. Firstly, Clarkson is a commentator not a comedian. He can say what he wants, but maybe stand-up suits his talents better than journalism. Secondly, even Clarkson sometimes makes sensible points about sensible issues. So what he's doing with his absurd exaggerations is blurring the line between what's real and should be taken seriously and what's nonsense. He's telling us it doesn't matter if you make stuff up as everything you read is just garbage. At the risk of becoming a po-faced liberal misery, I'm not sure that's wise. Clarkson plays his part in disintegrating intelligent debate. He also comes across as a bloody idiot, frankly. I'm pretty old-fashioned in believing that language should be used in a way which at least attempts to reflect reality. He could have called the rail issue a middle-class bribe, mocked the SNP for constantly changing tack, and said it was all the biggest load of cobblers since the Elves and the Shoemaker. But communism? Surely, he just makes himself and his argument ridiculous? Disordered. And by doing so encourages his readers to be ridiculous and disordered. The more we do this, the more commentary becomes meaningless, the more we carpet bomb ways of speaking to each other intelligently. During the debate about short-term holiday lets in Scotland, an Airbnb host described licensing plans as a "pogrom". A pogrom is defined as the mass murder of Jews. They debased their own argument; they debased the meaning of pogrom. It disintegrated shared reality. Boris Johnson just called Keir Starmer the EU's 'orange ball-chewing gimp'. Funny? Yes. In the pub, I'd spit my pint out laughing. But when an ex-Prime Minister says this he's telling us: don't care about truth, we need no shared way of debating. Britain is a "police state", Johnson says. Why? Because a woman was jailed for inciting racial hatred after tweeting 'set fire to the hotels' following the Southport murders which sparked mass rioting. Police state? Or justice you disagree with? We hear the same in Scotland. The 'Gestapo' and 'Stasi' would arrest you in your home thanks to anti-smacking laws. Just say you want to beat your kids. Don't invoke totalitarianism. The new Pope, who appears politically centrist, has been dubbed a 'woke Marxist' by leading MAGA commentators. Boris Johnson, who said Britain is a police state (Image: PA) But then MAGA owns the disordered discourse crown. Evidently, nothing comes close to telling the entire world Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets. The same disordered thinking appears in extremist claims that all trans women are rapists, all refugees are economic con-artists, and any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. It's silencing. British talk-show host Kevin Sullivan said after this week's new EU deal: 'I like standing in the non-EU passport lines! I'm proud not to join the Brussels-gang losers.' I guess he means he hated the deal, but rather than say that he claims to like wasting his life in queues. Evidently, much of this is attention-seeking. Much is also motivated by the playground mentality of "owning the libs". Thus you get people attacking the "be kind brigade". Since when was being kind bad? I guess if you're disordered it is. This all creates a society incapable of intelligent conversation. In Scotland today every issue is a crisis. Remember when a bottle return scheme was going to bring the nation to its knees, even though other nations had the same scheme? I'm not saying the legislation was right, I'm just saying we could rediscover an ordered way of expressing ourselves. If you cannot talk to your neighbour, you will hate them, and that way hell lies. Neil Mackay is The Herald's Writer at Large. He's a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store