US raid on Yakla, Yemen On 29 January 2017, a
United States-led Special Operations Forces operation was carried out in
Yakla Village,
Qifah District, in the
Al Bayda province in central
Yemen. It was the first raid authorized by President
Donald Trump, The US military initially denied there were any civilian casualties, but later declared it was investigating if they occurred. An investigation by the Bureau on the ground found that nine children under the age of 13 were killed, with the youngest victim a three-month-old baby. Beside the nine children killed, one pregnant woman was also killed. The Bureau's story was picked up by
The Guardian,
Newsweek and many other media outlets.
Bell Pottinger operations in Iraq The Bureau working with the
Sunday Times revealed on 2 October 2016 that the
Pentagon paid British PR firm
Bell Pottinger $540 million to create fake terrorist videos, fake news articles for Arab news channels and propaganda videos. An investigation by Abigail Fielding-Smith and Crofton Black revealed the details of the multimillion-pound operation. Bell Pottinger was paid by the
US Department of Defence (DoD) for five contracts from May 2007 to December 2011, according to
The Times and the Bureau. Lord Bell confirmed that Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the
CIA and the
U.S. National Security Council on its work in Iraq.
Deaths from antibiotic resistance The Bureau is running a continuing investigation into the threat posed by
antibiotic resistant bacteria. In December 2016, Madlen Davies working with the
Sunday Telegraph revealed that superbugs were killing at least twice as many people as the government estimated. In October 2016, Andrew Wasley working with
The Guardian revealed that pork contaminated with
MRSA was being sold at
Asda and
Sainsbury's.
Covert drone war The Bureau monitors drone strike casualties in
Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen and Somalia, these figures also include victims of drone strikes, airstrikes, missile attacks and ground operations. Unlike other organisations that track such deaths, the Bureau focuses on identifying non-militant deaths, including children. The data from this research is published online. Jack Serle was one of three Bureau reporters who won the
Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2013 for "their research into Barack Obama's drone wars and their consequences for civilians".
Binary options A series of articles in 2016 written by
Melanie Newman exposed the "real wolves of Wall Street" involved in
binary options fraud. According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau's head of crime, Detective Chief Inspector Andy Fyfe, this is the biggest fraud being perpetrated against British targets today with police receiving an average of two reports of binary trading fraud a day, with the average investor losing £16,000. Fyfe described this as "just the tip of the iceberg" because most of the frauds are not reported to the police because the fraudsters are usually located abroad.
Joint enterprise In February 2016, the
UK Supreme Court ruled that the law on "
joint enterprise" in murder cases, which allows for several people to be charged with the same offence even though they may have played very different roles in the crime, had been wrongly interpreted. This followed a long-running Bureau investigation into joint enterprise. The Bureau found that black British men were more than three times as likely to be serving life sentences as a result of a joint enterprise conviction than those in the prison population overall. Three Bureau reporters – Maeve McClenaghan,
Melanie McFadyean and Rachel Stevenson – won the 2013–14
Bar Council Legal Reporting Award for the coverage.
Europe's missing millions An investigation in collaboration with the
Financial Times into how the
European Union structural funds were used, and whether the policy was achieving what it set out to do. It found that millions of euros were being siphoned off by organised crime syndicates, and that money was being used to support multinational corporations instead of small and medium-sized businesses, including help to finance a
British American Tobacco cigarette factory. that received the UACES Reporting Europe Prize.
Lobbying's hidden influence Public relations firm
Bell Pottinger were the centre of a Bureau covert filming operation published in
The Independent. In the footage senior executives claim that they can get
UK prime minister David Cameron to speak to the
Chinese premier on behalf of one of their clients within 24 hours, and that they have a team which "sorts" negative
Wikipedia coverage.
Bell Pottinger subsequently filed a complaint with the
Press Complaints Commission about the investigation, which was rejected.
Deaths in police custody An investigation in collaboration with
The Independent found that the number of people who had died after being forcibly restrained whilst in police custody was higher than official figures showed. This was due to the exclusion of anyone who had died following restraint but had not at that point been formally arrested. The Bureau also reported their findings with the BBC in an episode of
File on 4. The story won an
Amnesty International Media Award.
Iraq war logs The
Iraq war logs were 391,832 classified
United States Army field reports leaked to
WikiLeaks, which shared them with a number of news organisations, including the Bureau, before publishing them online in their entirety. The Bureau worked with
Al Jazeera and
Channel 4 to analyse the documents which detail torture,
summary executions, and war crimes carried out by US forces. The Bureau's reporting received an
Amnesty International Media Award.
Russia Report In 2019, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism started a crowdfunding exercise to raise funds for legal action to force the British government to release the "Russia Report" detailing the
Intelligence and Security Committee's investigation into
Russian interference in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Cyprus Confidential In November 2023, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism joined with the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and 69 media partners including
Distributed Denial of Secrets and the
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and more than 270 journalists in 55 countries and territories to produce the '
Cyprus Confidential' report on the financial network which supports the regime of
Vladimir Putin, mostly with connections to Cyprus, and showed Cyprus to have strong links with high-up figures in the Kremlin, some of whom have been sanctioned. Government officials including Cyprus president
Nikos Christodoulides and European lawmakers began responding to the investigation's findings in less than 24 hours, ==Criticism==