Christiaan Triebert

Sherlock on the Internet

Christiaan Triebert is an award-winning journalist focused on war and conflict. As a member of Bellingcat, he specialises in using openly available information to investigate a wide variety of topics, such as airstrikes in the Middle East or illegal wildlife trafficking in Southern Africa. Given these new methods of investigation, Christiaan provides worldwide training in news verification — from Colombia to Iraq and from Kyrgyzstan to San Francisco. 

‘I’ve always had an interest in investigative journalism; at a certain point I started to verify video footage of the American and Russian armies,’ Christiaan Triebert told Dutch news broadcaster NOS. His findings on the misinformation about bombings in Syria, were noticed by the research group Bellingcat that invited him to join the group.

In the summer of 2016 Triebert made himself noticed again after he deciphered and published the WhatsApp-conversation of the leaders of the Turkish coup. The conversation between highly ranked army officers quickly became world news. Remarkably, Triebert, who is used to traveling the world as a digital nomad, worked on this in Kuala Lumpur. For over a week he worked non-stop, with the help of a Turkish girl he found through Twitter who helped him with the translations from Turkish. 

Next to his research work and journalism, Triebert also provides training in open source investigation. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Daily Beast, and Foreign Policy, amongst others. In addition to his digital research, Christiaan has worked as a (photo)journalist in a variety of conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and Syria. His digital reconstruction of the coup attempt in Turkey was awarded with the European Press Prize in 2017. He holds a master’s degree in Conflict, Security & Development from King’s College London and two bachelor degrees (International Relations, and Philosophy of a Specific Discipline) from the University of Groningen. Twitter: @trbrtc.