MOSCOW, August 25 (RIA Novosti) - British blogger Eliot Higgins has located a training camp of the Islamic State (IS) radical Sunni group using only public-available online mapping services, according to the blogger’s website.
“In the entire area there’s only one possible location that matches, on the north side of the river, with the camera pointing south,” the Bellingcat site, founded by Eliot Higgins, claims.
The Bellingcat team, which includes bloggers, research analysts and traditional reporters used Google Earth, Flash Earth and Panoramio to pinpoint the location of the IS camp.
First, the team used Google Earth to identify a large river and several bridges in stills taken from videos showing the graduation of an IS class earlier this year. The river turned out to be Tigris, located in the city of Mosul in Iraq. IS militants took control of the city in June.
To see where along the river the IS camp building is situated, the Bellingcat team used Flash Earth and Panoramino, a service that takes the location metadata on photographs and puts them on a Google Map.
The photographs used by Higgins and the Bellingcat team were taken off Twitter.
Eliot Higgins, also known as Brown Moses, became famous in 2013, when he claimed to have proven that Syria was using chemical weapons without leaving his bedroom in Leicester, England and using only images and videos available online.
Higgins founded the Bellingcat site in 2012 to finance his activity.
