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50 journalists died around the world in 2020, many of them brutally murdered while investigatijng crime and corruption
Increasingly, investigative journalists are being targeted for assassination because of their work according to the annual round-up report produced by Reporters without Borders (RSF).
In 2020 50 journalists were killed around the world, some in war zones, but two thirds died in countries that are at peace. Seven journalists were killed while covering protests.
Many of these killed were deliberately, targeted by governments or criminal agents. Most of those were investigative journalists involved in dangerous assignments.
“83% of the journalists killed this year were deliberately targeted,” explained RSF Director of International Campaigns, Rebecca Vincent in a recent BBC World Service interview. “That has sharply increased over the past few years…we’re seeing a deliberate increase in those who are being sought out, targeted and murdered. Many of those are investigative journalists.”
The RSF report says the most dangerous stories are investigations into cases of local corruption or misuse of public funds (10 journalists killed in 2020) or investigations into the activities of organised crime (four killed). And three were murdered while working on subjects linked to environmental issues (such as illegal mining or land-grabbing).
In particular Mexico (with eight killed) and India with four are highlighted. Some of these deliberate murders were particularly brutal as RSF reports.
“In Mexico, Julio Valdivia Rodríguez, a reporter for the daily El Mundo, was found beheaded in the eastern state of Veracruz, while Víctor Fernando Álvarez Chávez, the editor of the local news website Punto x Punto Noticias, was cut to pieces in the western city of Acapulco. In India, Rakesh “Nirbhik” Singh, a reporter for the Rashtriya Swaroop newspaper, was burned alive in December after being doused with a highly flammable, alcohol-based hand sanitiser in his home in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh by men sent by a local official whose corrupt practices he had criticised, while Isravel Moses, a TV reporter in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, was hacked to death with machetes.”
As of the time of writing no one has been arrested or charged in connection with any of these murders.
Journalists also continue to be arrested and detained in their hundreds around the world. Most recently in China, Zhang Zhan a 37-year-old former lawyer and citizen journalist reporting on the pandemic from Wuhan has been sentenced to four years in prison for ‘disseminating false information’.
According to her lawyer, Zhang Zhan is in poor health after being restrained 24 hours per day and force fed through a tube after she decided to go on hunger strike.
At least six citizen journalists reporting on the pandemic from Wuhan have been detained or arrested. One of the most prominent, Fang Bin was arrested in February and has not been seen in public since. It is thought that he is imprisoned in a secret location.
“The world’s violence continues to be visited upon journalists,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said. “Some may think that journalists are just the victims of the risks of their profession, but journalists are increasingly targeted when they investigate or cover sensitive subjects. What is being attacked is the right to be informed, which is everyone’s right.”
Although all 192 members states of the United Nations have signed the universal declaration of human rights--including Article 19 which protects freedom of information and expression--too many of them continue to ignore and abuse that obligation. 2021 will not be a time for those who value free and independent journalism to look the other way.
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Investigating Crime and the Coronavirus
Medical personnel in Egypt died during the pandemic in 2020 when they used counterfeit masks supplied in 2007 from a Chinese company.
Billions of dollars from public funds have almost certainly been stolen and siphoned off by organised criminals during the Covid-19 pandemic.
That’s the assessment from Paul Radhu, an executive director of the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) a global network of investigative journalists.
This year OCCRP has focussed on money being spent by world governments to fund the battle against the pandemic. This work has resulted in a special report called Crime, Corruption and the Coronavirus. (See link below.)
Speaking online at the annual Transparency International anti-corruption conference in December, Radhu outlined the issues and problems faced in reporting on crime related to the pandemic.
“Criminals have been very quick to take advantage of the situation. In every crisis crime and corruption thrive.
“Very early on criminal organisations and crooked politicians started making plans—business plans. They inserted themselves into supply chains [for critical equipment], and they created supply chains for items such as masks, ventilators, and PPE, whatever was needed and still needed.”
Although it is impossible to know exactly how much money has been stolen and siphoned off by criminals, Radhu is confident it is in the billions. Criminal gangs have used the pandemic to entrench themselves online and to intervene in the supply of medicines and hospital equipment.
“The general public puts organised crime in a basket where there’s a bunch of thugs that look for opportunities for crime and they’re violent. But really these people are entrepreneurs, criminal entrepreneurs. Cybercrime has been in their field for a long, long time.”
Radhu also spoke of criminal ‘Angel’ investors who have bankrolled underground operations related to the pandemic. They have done this instead of funding legitimate businesses working for the public good simply because the rate of return is so high.
And though the numbers have yet to be run on the criminal profits from the pandemic Radhu has no doubt about the harm done: “Corrupt politicians and organised criminals have worked against the public health interest quite a bit in the past year.”
He also admitted that the criminals have got a significant head start and that investigative journalists need to be quick in acquiring more cyber skills.
“Unfortunately the criminals are ahead of journalists, and civil society organisations. They have a lot more resources, a lot more access to server power because they control ISPs.
“There’s a dire need for more cybercriminal type of work to investigate code to see who is behind ransom wear and other types of online fraud.”
And the worst may be yet to come. In December Interpol issued a warning about what it called an ‘onslaught’ of criminal activity related to the supply of Covid-19 vaccines.
“It is essential that law enforcement is as prepared as possible for what will be an onslaught of all types of criminal activity linked to the COVID-19 vaccine,” said the international law enforcement agency’s Secretary Jürgen General Stock.
After more than 30 years—will 2021 see the truth told about Lockerbie?
Leading investigative journalist Paul Foot wrote this landmark report on the Lockerbie bombing for Private Eye
Could we finally be on the verge of learning the truth about the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing, the biggest mass murder in modern British history?
It happened on the winter solstice, in the days leading up to Christmas 32 years ago. It’s a day always remembered by the friends and familes of the victims but 2020 might be the last year when the truth behind the bombing can be avoided.
The on-board bomb exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 departed Heathrow en route to New York. All 259 people on board were killed, and 11 people died on the ground when the debris from the stricken plane hit their homes.
Although the crime took place over British territory the vast majority of the victims were American, 190 of the total of 270 fatalities.
Outgoing US attorney general William Barr (who was also attorney general in the Bush administration at the time of Lockerbie) chose this latest anniversary to announce that the US would be charging the alleged ex-Libyan intelligence officer Abu Agila Mohammed Masud in connection with the atrocity.
In a televised address he announced American prosecutors will seek extradition of Masud from Libya to stand trial in the US. Masud is suspected of being the bomb maker and is said to have carried out the attack on the orders of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Many are left wondering why Barr has waited for this moment to broadcast this news.Did he want to finish his political career on a high note of crime fighting bravado? Or did he want to reinforce the official version of events that the bombing was carried out by Libyans, and no other state was involved?
The UK families of the Lockerbie victims have consistently called for a public inquiry into the deaths-- on the grounds of aviation safety as well as the criminal aspects of the case. (There were reports of several warnings being made in the days leading up to the flight.)
This call was refused by Margaret Thatcher and every British government since 1988.
Only one man has ever been convicted for the murders, a Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset Ali Mohamed Al Megrahi. He was tried by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands. He spent only 9 years of a life sentence in a Scottish prison before being released on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died three years later in Tripoli, but even on his deathbed continued to proclaim his innocence.
Such is the belief in his innocence that the campaigning group of UK Lockerbie families helped fund an appeal against al Megrahi’s conviction. In November the appeal against conviction was heard in the Scottish High Court. The court’s decision is expected in the early part of the new year.
As far as nailing down guilt for this horrendous crime, the UK and US have continued to maintain that Libya is the perpetrator, although at the outset, suspicion was focussed squarely on Iran.
Iran had sworn revenge in public against the Americans after the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Persian Gulf in July 1988, barely 6 months before the bombing. All 290 people on board the Iran flight, including 60 children, were killed.
But in 1991 the American government suddenly and without explanation changed it approach. It needed both Syria and Iran to support military action against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. It was reported that George Bush Snr had asked Margaret Thatcher to change tack on the Lockerbie investigation as a result. The Americans decided to blame it on the Libyans instead, who openly supported Saddam Hussein’s regime. Helpfully, there was plenty of evidence of Libya’s involvement in terrorist atrocities elsewhere.
( Libya did agree to pay compensation to victims in exchange for the lifting of UN and then US sanctions, after a vaguely-worded, indirect admission of guilt.)
But painstaking journalistic inquiry over the past 32 years has produced a preponderance of evidence discrediting al Megrahi’s conviction and pointing the finger at Iran, acting in concert with Syria and a Palestinian splinter group, (PLFP-GC).
One of the leading investigations was carried out by the legendary Paul Foot who reported on Lockerbie for both the Daily Mirror and Private Eye. His report ‘Lockerbie: The Flight from Justice’ remains one of the benchmark investigative reports. You can read it by clicking on the link below.
Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died aboard the flight, has been a prominent campaigner for justice and truth over the past three decades. His book ‘Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice’ will be published this year. In a recent TV interview he welcomed the new developments announced by Barr but found it ‘extraordinary’ that the Americans were still pursuing Libyan suspects when the evidence supporting a Libyan connection had been discredited over time.
Dr Swire added that The UK families Flight 103 campaign group only have two primary objectives: “ One is why those lives were not protected in the light of all those warnings [made before the flight]…no effort was made to protect the aircraft. And what does our government and the American government really know about who is responsible for murdering them?”
He added that he found the timing of the announcement by Barr ‘remarkably strange’ in the light of the appeal just heard in Edinburgh. He felt that the trial judgment could be set aside in light of the fact that the primary witness who identified Megrahi was offered a payment by the CIA of one or two million dollars in exchange for his testimony.
If the Scottish law lords do set aside this verdict, then the Lockerbie bombing will come back to haunt the UK and American governments, not to mention the Iranians and the Syrians.
“Overturning of the verdict for the Megrahi family, and many of the families of British victims also supporting the appeal, would vindicate their belief that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom stand accused of having lived a monumental lie for 31 years,” the family’s lawyer, Aamer Anwar, said in a statement ahead of the Scottish High Court hearing.
Where the money went: Mezhyria, the palatial estate near Kiev that disgraced President Viktor Yanukovych had to abandon when he fled to Russia to escape prosecution. It is now a public park and museum, and a contemporary monument to investigative journalism.
The Ukraine is not a country that readily comes to mind as being in the vanguard of investigative journalism.
But the dramatic story of the Yanukovych Leaks investigation—still unfolding today after almost seven years of reporting and criminal proceedings—will convince you otherwise.
There is no doubt that something very special was accomplished by a young team of 12 journalists and scores of citizen volunteers in the wake of the Ukrainian Euromaidan revolution of February 2014 which overthrew dictatorial president Viktor Yanukovych.
On February 21 of that year the disgraced autocrat fled his extravagantly luxurious estate, Mezhyria, for permanent exile in Russia. What followed was a unique collaboration between investigative journalists, technologists and civil society--unprecedented in the history of the Ukraine.
Those involved recovered 25,000 documents from the estate and compiled them into a searchable digital resource open to the world. In 2019 those documents were used by state prosecutors to convict the ex-president in absentia of high treason, sentencing him to 13 years in prison.
Several criminal cases against Yanukovych and his associates are ongoing as is the search for his hidden money and assets—some invested in western countries.
TV journalist and editor Natalie Sedletska recounted and updated the story of the Yanukovych Leaks--and her part in it--at the recent ‘Collective Intelligence’ symposium held across internet by the London-based Centre for Investigative Journalism. She began with the autocrat’s hasty retreat.
“When leaving the compound Yanukovych ordered the documents to be destroyed that were preserved in Mezihyra,” she explained. “His staff tried to burn them at the beginning, but in the end they just threw them in a lake at the compound.”
“It was a cold, icy February but professional divers came who dived into the water to get these documents.”
Natalie and her team dedicated themselves 24/7 over several days to rescue the documents—employing hair dryers, an industrial dryer from a major public library, as well as drafting in volunteers armed with laptops and scanners to copy and digitise all of the files.
“And it was also fun to dry documents using Yanukovych’s sauna,” she added.
According to Natalie, within only one week the team went from a having a shedful of soggy files to setting up the Yanukovych Leaks website. This cyber resource documented how the president operated his corrupt regime through a system of bribes, illicit cash payments, and surveillance and control.
The journalists found copies of handwritten cheques given as bribes, and receipts for cash payments. (One for $12 million!)
“Oligarchs and businessmen had to share their income with the president’s family and now it was known to the public,” explained Natalie.
The documents also showed what he spent the money on: Millions of dollars on house fixtures including $30 million on chandeliers crafted from gold and diamonds.
“His residence included a spa complex, food laboratory, a garage with vintage cars, even a zoo inhabited by animals from around the world.”
Mezhirya is now a museum and park, open to the public. The archive continues to be available to everyone on the internet, in Ukrainian, Russian and English. Every year since 2014 (except 2020 of course) a Mezhirya Fest is held at the estate to celebrate the reclaiming of Mezhirya as a public space for the people of the Ukraine—and to celebrate investigative journalism.
“So many people were involved, it was a moment of such transparency, there was no doubt about whether [the archive] should be public,” said Natalie. “We also wanted people in the new government to understand and be reminded from this famous project that no matter how [well] you hide your wrongdoings, your secrets may become public.”
As a result of the success of Yanukovych Leaks, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty have also launched an investigative programme strand called Schemes—Corruption in Detail which investigates submissions from whistleblowers and data leaks in order to shed light on crime and unlawful activity in the country, still regarded as one of the most corrupt in Europe.
But Natalie also warned that threats against investigative work by journalists continue in the Ukraine. In addition to various intrusions by the courts, the team car was destroyed in an arson attack last summer. But the citizens of the Ukraine came to the rescue again, and through public donations enabled the editorial team to replace it. Naturally, Natalie was pleased by this vote of confidence.
“The fact that 500 people donated $10,000 altogether shows that people in the Ukraine value our work.”
