The online data detective team first gained prominence after its investigation of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown.
The Dutch government would later indict four men, three Russians and a Ukrainian, for 298 counts of murder, basing some of its investigation on Bellingcat's work. "The Russian government passed a specific law banning soldiers from carrying-- mobile devices during hostilities, which is dubbed in Russia 'the Bellingcat law.'" Christo Grozev said.
Bellingcat's next big project, the Russian assassination program, started in 2018 after a Russian defector and his daughter, living in Britain, were poisoned with Novichok, a military-grade nerve agent. The British had passport photos and false names of two suspects, but nothing else. Grozev knew that Russia's government and commercial records are for sale on an online black market. So, with the fake names, he bought the suspect's passport records.
"There was a big black stamp in the corner of their file which said, 'Do not provide information on this person. In case of a query, call this number,'" Grozev said."And sure enough, we called that number, and it was the [Russian] Ministry of Defense." Over months, Grozev uncovered a network of Russian hitmen, working throughout Europe, armed with nerve agent from a government lab. Later, he uncovered another network, after buying airline manifests and finding some of the assassins' travel overlapped the campaign stops of Alexei Navalny, the top political opponent of Vladimir Putin.
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