today we're looking at a podcast trying to solve a podcast trying to solve a podcast from a boy from london who went missing more than a0 years ago, so digital sleuthing and old school reporting. we are joined and old school reporting. we arejoined byjournalist behind both stories about the sources

and techniques to get them over the line. jack is a 21—year—old airman from massachusetts and currently facing 15 years jail. he has been charged with leaking classified documents thatis leaking classified documents that is alleged to have posted on the online chat form discord this year. the documents reveal secrets about ukraine and american allies. the documents revealed us assessments of the war in ukraine as well as sensitive secrets about american allies. when the fbi finally arrested teixeira on the 13th of april, the new york times and other journalists had already identified him as a suspect. how they did it is a fascinating story in itself. and two of them are here now. one of them, haley willis, works in the visualjournalism team at the new york times. haley, welcome. now, you were outside his home as the fbi turned up. talk us through what happened. yes, that's right. thank you for having me, katie. so we identified jack teixeira through some digital sleuthing, which we'll talk about in a bit

more, on wednesday night, very late wednesday night. ijumped in a car at aam thursday morning and drove up to massachusetts. and we didn't yet know 100% if he was the source of the leaks. but we certainly knew that he was very likely to be, given some visual evidence, and we definitely knew that he was in this group where the leaks happened, and so we definitely wanted to get the chance to speak to him, speak to his parents, to give them a chance to respond to this. and when we arrived at his house, it was pretty clear that the fbi was already there surveilling. there were cars kind of driving back and forth along the street, but we were the first ones there to actually approach the house. we spoke with his mother. she didn't share too much information with us, but did confirm his military service. later on, we actually saw jack himself drive onto the property. we approached again to speak with his mother and his stepfather, who essentially told us, you know, we don't have our own evidence. i explained some of

the evidence we had collected, and they told me at this point, jack would only be speaking to an attorney, that the feds would likely be there soon. and within 20 minutes of that conversation, there was a surveillance plane flying overhead. and we soon published our story. and at that point, of course, it was clear the fbi was already on to it as well. and then within another hour, hour and a half, the raid actually took place. so a number of vehicles showed up to the home, men in full military gear with military style rifles entered the property. and of course, teixeira himself was then apprehended. a moment in history and you were there to witness it. now, someone else with a byline on the story is aric toler, who's a researcher at bellingcat. aric, how did you...if we go back to the beginning of this story, if you like, or the beginning of your involvement with it, how did you first come across the documents? thanks for having me. so i came across them basically the way that almost everyone else did, which was the new york times

published a story on, i think it was april 6th, that talked about the pentagon was looking into these leaks that had popped up on telegram, which is a popular messaging app. there was a russian...a handful of russian channels that were sharing five documents, in particular, one of which turned out to be doctored, very crudely doctored, by changing round some casualty statistics. and i went through digging and looking for the source of these because i doubted that this random telegram channel was the original source. and from there, i traced it back, saw earlier documents on achan, which is the kind of far right, i don't know, troll network, image board. and then going back even further through some tips i got from some random people on twitter, i found that these had been posted a month prior on discord, which is a popular chat app used by gamers in particular. and just to stop you there, so you said you... ..you were live tweeting, were you, as you went, so you were getting information from other people as you went along, that's how you found out that it was on discord?

yeah. so i was kind of, like, live tweeting my research process of, like, oh, i found this and i found this and i found this and, arm, which was both good and bad. it was good in the sense that i had people dming me of, like, like, oh, ifound it actually a week earlier here or, like, oh, ifound it here. so people were kind of feeding me tips as i was doing my live tweeting, but also it's bad, because when i tweeted about it, people would realise that they had...that they had it up there, they may get in trouble for posting these leaked documents, they would delete them from their source. so it was good that people were feeding me information through, like, tips and so on into my twitter inbox. but bad because, you know, 15 minutes after i would tweet about it, someone, they would delete everything. so, you know, a little bit of good, a little bit of bad with that. so, haley, so there's aric, you know, he finds out that these documents are on discord and that they had been on there, you know, a month before. you work for the visual investigations team, as i think i said earlier, and actually it was a photo, i think, ofjack teixeira standing at home in his kitchen that was a vital clue for you. just talk me through that.

yeah, absolutely. so we decided as a team to team up and partner with aric. a few of us have worked with him previously. it's a small circle of folks who do this type of reporting to kind of dig further into details and figure out what else we could establish. and originally we were actually seeking out whether or not there were more documents. so we were looking for sources that might have shared this information, but not necessarily attempting to find who the leaker was. and itjust led us in that direction. you know, aric had identified the gaming profiles of a few of these folks, and we started looking into their mutual friends to establish who else might have been involved. a few of us, with aric, and the visual investigations team were trading details back and forth, social media profiles, which eventually led us to the profile of teixeira's sister. and she had posted a lot of photos from inside their family home, photos of him. in one photo in particular he's standing in his military gear and he's actually standing by a kitchen countertop and on a white tiled floor. and a member of our team noticed that a few of the documents were photographed

actually on a granite countertop and above a tile floor that exactly matched to what we saw in the teixeira family home, in their mother's home, which is where i eventually went the next day. so that was kind of a key piece of visual evidence, along with the fact, of course, that he was friends with all of these people running in the same circles, but that it actually seemed to visually match the location where the documents had been photographed. i mean, how rare is that to happen in yourjournalistic career, to match something like that? that feels a bit more sort of police work, in a sense, but i suppose that's what you're up to. yeah. i mean, you know, certainly, like, i think this is the first time i've seen granite open source investigation using the visual clues of a countertop. but that specific is often how this work gets, right, as being that sure and looking for every single piece of corroboration. but definitely this was...this was a new one for the books. and when you...we were talking

at the beginning about you heading up to jack's address, i mean, what was the plan at that point? were you planning to confront him, or what? and how did you feel as you were heading there? i was certainly nervous. i think we didn't know what to expect. i mean, this could have been a guy with a gun, for example. i mean, i know i hate to malign america... exactly. ..but... no, abso...i don't... i don't think you are... ..i mean, there is evidence from his online profiles that he probably did... ..there probably were guns in the house. and so i went with two other colleagues, both of whom are former military. and so we kind of took a safe approach in terms of preparing for that being a possibility. but the idea wasn't necessarily to confront jack and say, we know you leaked these documents. you know, we wanted to raise the fact that we knew he was part of this group, that we were interested if he had information to share. but then we arrived on the scene and the way that his parents responded to me, the way that we saw the feds kind of already secretly surveilling it, made it pretty clear that we were probably right that he was the source of the leak. and that changed the calculus a bit. and ultimately, you know, we wanted to do our due diligence and give him the chance to respond.

and he...his parents declined on his behalf that he would not be speaking with us. and aric, were you in contact with haley as she was on the way there? and what were you up to at that point? yeah, it was a strange morning on the 13th because haley was sitting in... ..she got stuck in the kind of the search area for... ..how long were you there, haley? like, 12 hours or something? yeah, basically the whole day. a long time! yeah. sitting in a car all day in rural massachusetts, which probably was... ..you probably had more fun days in your life than that. but, yeah, iwas, you know, most of my work had already been done, because, i mean, like, a lot of the digital sleuthing was just to find the lead and to find the identity of this person's gaming profile, which is linked to all the people in the server where we know that the leak originated. and then once you kind of linked his real name and address and phone number, you know, i wasjust sitting here, like, in the audience watching along with everybody else, kind of in group chats and calls ofjust kind of holding our breath about what was going to happen and you know, this raid is going to happen and so on. but i mean another thing that i...that maybe is worth noting is that the fbi knew about this guy days before. so february 13th is

when haley drove out to massachusetts to meet him. but we know now from the charging documents that they knew that jack was, like, the leaker back on the 10th, so at least three days prior. so, if anything, you know, haley may have...our colleagues may have accelerated their timeline a little bit, seeing they were surveilling him and they probably had been for a while. and so, if anything, you may have been a little adversarial to the fbi's process of surveilling him and keeping an eye on him. absolutely. and we're going to come back to you both in a minute, because i just want to talk about another very different journalistic investigation right now. i mean, this one is a bbc podcast. vishal is its title and colin campbell is the co—presenter. and colin, you know, welcome to the programme. you're sitting right here with me. just tell...tell us about it. so vishal is a multi—episode investigative podcast. - it is an examination - of the murder and abduction of vishal mehrotra.

he was abducted off- the streets of putney in 1981. his partial remains were found in sussex woodland seven - months later in 1982. and our investigation is an investigation i into what we believe - is significant new information relating to a group of four, i possibly five, convicted child abusers who were operating| between south—west london and sussex in or around - the late '70s and the 1980s. and this is an investigation, l though, that was kick—started when i received a phone call from shaun keep, l who's sitting on my left here. he is, and i'm going to bring him in in a minute, but i just want to say one thing first, which is, you know, haley and aric were describing their sources just now, and that was essentially sort of fragments, a lot of it fragments of digital information that they found online. but, you know, your source was actually much more old school. you've talked about shaun, there was a tip—off from shaun. that-s right. — shaun gave me the tip—off.

but then i started to - investigate all of the issues relating to what he tipped me off about. _ so i then...that tip off. led me to the front door of a convicted child abuser. and i then interviewed him repeatedly over the course j of three years, speaking to him specifically about what he - remembered of the 1970s - and the 1980s, questioning him as to why he had titled i and written a document that was found in his - possession, which he had titled vishal, which is- an incredibly rare indian name. so i had to really scrutinise and ask him repeatedly, i why were you found | with this document? and then we later discovered that there was a fourth manl who fled from the uk - in or around 1996, and this was an individual who had been convicted in the late 1970s - of picking up boys off the street in a car, i and he had fled in the late '90s to india. _

and he explains in this podcast that he has a fascination, - just like the other offender. who we were speaking with, a sexual fascination - with boys of indian heritage. i do want to bring shaun keep in. thank you for sitting there so patiently. you're a former metropolitan police super duper detective, but you're the one who, you know, as colin said, you know, found the potential link originally to this previously unconnected crime. why go to a journalist? why go to colin? well, can i correct you on one point? yeah. i didn't find the link. it was a member of my team. but once that link was found, our team worked on it. and then after about two or three months, we took it to some senior officers in sussex police and a gold group was convened, as they do for major inquiries, etc. and all was going well. it looked to me that they were actually taking it seriously and going to do something about it. i then left sussex police, took another contract elsewhere and ifound out some months later that they had... ..all they had done was gone round and knocked on doors

of some of the suspects that colin has mentioned and effectively said, "oh, do you know anything about a murder back in the 19805?" and of course, all they said was, "no comment," or, "don't know what you're talking about." and they closed the inquiry down. as far as i...from that point on, i knew that no further investigation was going to take place. you didn't think that was good enough? i didn't think it was good enough. and that's why i thought, well, 0k, what could i do about this? i thought it was quite insulting, actually. they used the words proportionate and not proportionate, etc. well, what could be possibly disproportionate as far as a police tactic is concerned when you're dealing with a heinous crime of abduction and murder of an eight—year—old child, and i knew the system wasn't going to change. so i thought, i'm going to do something about this. fik. and it is worth saying sussex police, you know, have given a statement. they say vishal�*s murder had been on its schedule of cases that are assessed every two years short of a major review, and that it was satisfied that all enquiries in relation to the four sexual offenders had been thorough and completed with careful consideration of all surrounding information. obviously, you took

a different view. you originally, i think it was anonymous, where you wanted to stay anonymous in terms of talking to colin, but then you've decided to feature in the podcast and you're not anonymous any more. no, i'm not. and i think at the end of the day, i'm doing the right thing here. i knew that sussex police weren't investigating any further. i knew, therefore, that no damage could be done to the investigation because there wasn't any investigation going on. but i felt that there was a strong opportunity here to take this further and learn more about what happened to vishal, if someone would only devote some time and energy and effort... and that someone is colin. colin, yes. and colin, i was going to ask you because, you know, listeners to this, viewers might know you a bit more from your more sort of traditional style. i don't mean that in a pejorative way but, you know, your news investigations on tv, on radio, how did you find the podcast format? this is the first time i've - done a podcast and we realised from the outset that by putting a podcast together it would - help us appeal for information. but i was incredibly privileged l to know that shaun came to me and that's because i'd spent

ten years previously- investigating child sexual abuse within the church i of england. so i think he thought that i was equipped i with the right type of skills. and it was...my sourcesl became — and the people who drove my investigation forward — are the survivors| and the victims of sexual abuse who were abused by this - group of offenders. and they, as shaun told me at the outset of this - investigation, they would be the ones who would be able| to inform me and give me really key bits of information. - and it is their courage| and bravery that really helped me drive forward this investigation. - but a podcast, i've really enjoyed it. l it's been...it's beenl a roller—coaster ride, a three—year investigation with riveting turns. - and i really want everybody to listen to it because it- could solve a child murder. well, let's hear a bit of it now. this is when you confront a convicted british paedophile in sri lanka, who was already on the run from another investigation and who you think has questions to answer. ijust have to ask you once again. i no, i did not kill this kid, whoever the hell he is. i don't know anything about it. had you heard of this - case of vishal mehrotra?

i promise i haven't. it's something that you would i have known about, though, jim, if you were in the uk, yeah? of course i did, of course i did. you don't want to make any admissions to any crimes i that you've committed. no! and colin, i asked haley earlier about what her feelings were when she went to jack teixeira's house. i mean, how did you prepare for that confrontation? as a regional reporter, - you have to do lives regularly, so you have to rehearse | what you're going to say in your head, and i had almostl rehearsed what i wanted to do, what i wanted - to achieve with this. because it's a doorstep interview, effectively. i i could have just turned up, asked him a few questions. j he told me, you know, get lost. close the door in my face. - miraculously, he invited me into his property. i there was a dog | barking nonstop. that was almostl like a distraction. it helped me get in and then i was able to bluster my way in and just ask him everything. and he allowed me to record. and when i said i was a bbc journalist, he almost felt, l erm, idon't know, that almost allowed him to open up- and start talking to me.

but there were significant inconsistencies in - what he was saying. i wasn't expecting i the reception that he gave to me either. i do have a question, which is, bbc editorial policy does strongly advise journalists not to see themselves as helping the police, but surely there is a bit of an element of that here. i mean, how do you navigate those rules? so i think this is - pretty straightforward. we received new information that the police already had. i we were then scrutinising that information and investigating i it to try to find out - if there was any worth in it. and our three—year. investigation has got to a stage where we haven't proven that these men are i guilty of the crime or a crime. what we have discovered i is that we believe that there is a strong case for- sussex police to reopen this investigation- into vishal's murder. and haley, can ijust bring you back in? i wonder what your take is on the relationship journalists should have with the authorities. i mean, do you get nervous when you're chasing the same sort of information that the police might be? and how do you view that?

yeah, it's a good question. i mean, to be honest, like, the simple answer is we do ourjob entirely independently of what authorities are doing. and, you know, questions came out of, like, the new york times published the story and two hours later the raid happened. and we talked earlier about, like, clarifying that timeline. of course, the fbi was already on to him through other means than oui’ means. but i think the reality is it's like we have a job to do. 0urjob is to, you know, find this information for the public good of, like, what does it mean that a 21—year—old shared this on a chat where they were, like, also sharing racist memes? and, you know, what due...journalistic due diligence of giving him and his parents the chance to respond, and we wanted to do that regardless of the fact that the fbi were there. and as aric said, they were there and i knew that probably us entering that property and speaking to his mother and asking to speak to him was probably not on their schedule for the day, but that was the job that we came there to do and we continued to do

it despite that fact. and aric toler, bringing you back in too, from bellingcat, you know, you were key as well to this pentagon leaks story, the scoop. do you ever feel that rather than publish the information you're finding, perhaps you should just stop and call the police? i mean, are there ever ethical considerations like that involved? yeah. we try to avoid working with police on security stuff. i mean, the rare times when we have talked to police are things around, like, child abuse imagery and things like that, because we've worked with europol. they have a lot of initiatives to use kind of open source, digital investigative methods to identify background objects and items that are from child abuse materials. so they have some public initiatives that are very interesting, kind of, like, calling for public help with that. and we've assisted with those in particular with police departments, but that's kind of an exception, because it's such a unique area where i compare it to things like national security and so on. and i think in the jack teixeira case, i think the fbi did call you and you ignored them. yeah.

why? explain that. yeah, yeah. yeah, they called me up. i was at the zoo with my kid last week and they called me, they wanted to talk to me. and they made it sound very voluntary, but i didn't know if this voluntary would become involuntary soon after. and i asked our lawyer at bellingcat, like, do i... because i'd never encountered this before. like, do i actually have to do this? could ijust tell them no? will they go away? and our lawyers are, like, yeah, you know, you have pretty strong, you know, first amendment protections and all that stuff. so our lawyerjust kind of respectfully declined. one of theirjustice department lawyers also got involved in this on their end, and theyjust basically stopped contacting me, so that was nice. and are the civilian online investigators currently better at it than the authorities? i mean, how much is that down to how transparent you are and how covert they actually feel they need to be? it really depends on the topic. i mean, when you look at people looking at old cold cases and murderers, they're notoriously horrible. when you look at the investigators about those, people finding false leads.

i'm thinking about the case of the murders in... ..i think it was idaho, that happened in the us a while ago. and the person it turned out to be... ..the person who ended up being the murderer had... ..no—one...was on nobody's radar. there were a thousand different online sleuths there, wannabe sleuths who thought they identified them, but they were completely wrong. but when you look at other cases around things like, you know, war crimes and things that have a lot of user generated content, and just, like, a lot of data to sort through, you can use the power of the crowd to sort through hundreds and thousands of photos and videos, to kind of find narratives and kind of picking out events. there it works better, using the powers of crowds, kind of like this kind of crowdsourced labour compared to something like police work with, like, a cold case murder, where it's notoriously unreliable, if not even harmful. and haley willis from the new york times, just add to that, if you can. i mean, you presumably are sometimes quite quiet, quite secret, quite covert about your investigations. yeah. it's a good point. i feel like a lot of us come from this open source online investigator background, as aric does, but are now working for, you know,

a large media institution that does have some more walls up in terms of protecting its sources and, you know, not getting scooped and things like that. so i think we try to strike the right balance between trying to keep those conversations open with our community and people like aric and wanting to share things that we're finding, like putting information out there as we're going on. we often do call—out, like, we are investigating protests in hong kong. we're investigating, you know, a shooting event in dallas or whatever. if you have information come to us and we want to keep those lines open. but of course, do have to balance that then with keeping some things close to our chest and obviously, of course, with human sources keeping those particularly kind of close to our chest. 0k. and shaun keep, let me bring you back in. i mean, arejournalists of use to the police more widely or are they a hindrance? they're useful to you right now for this podcast. but more broadly, from your

time in the police, what was your view of journalists? yeah, it was difficult. you have to balance up what they can produce for you and how much you're going to expose your investigation to them. it's very important that we do keep a lot of information back because we know that that is useful when we come to interview suspects, etc. we don't want too much to go out on them. so it's always a balance of how, how close and how much we reveal. but clearly we are very used to and know how valuable those appeals, etc can be. and having in a sense seen both sides now, now that you're involved in the podcast, do you think the methodology is pretty similar between the police and journalists in terms of getting stories, or getting stories over the line? yeah, i mean, at the end of the day, a detective digs and digs and digs and a journalist is going to dig and dig and dig if that's what they want to do, if they're trying to achieve their goals. i think there is a difference because obviously the police are more regulated. they've got to act within the police and criminal evidence act and various other acts that they have to, but also they enjoy powers. they have some investigative powers that colin here doesn't have. so there is a difference.

but ultimately the aim is the same, to try and find out what's happened. and colin campbell, just as we come to the end, colin campbell, special correspondent at the bbc, you know, you said you hope people might come forward as a result of this. you might get new information, might solve the case. have you received any information? what is the idea behind this? that you might get, finally get justice for vishal's family? so we have received some emails, some texts. - we have set up an appeal email. in the hope that people l will get in contact with us because as sean will...well, has repeatedly reinforced, l you know, a cold case is never over really. l ithere is still always potential. leads and that's something that i've learnt off him. and you know, we havei gained new information. we've...we've...we've kind of investigated what's gonej on and we just hope that we get more people getting _ in contact with us. well, thank you so much, colin campbell and shaun keep with the podcast vishal on the bbc sounds app. that's where you can find it. also, thank you so much

to haley willis from the new york times and aric toler of bellingcat. thank you so much for listening. goodbye. hello there. on tuesday, it was a largely dry day across the uk. the best of the day's sunshine was across western areas, where we had some lovely blue skies through the afternoon in west wales, for example. elsewhere, though, there was quite a bit of cloud that bubbled up through the day. with high pressure in charge, actually where the winds came round, that high pressure, that was really important to how the day felt. in scarborough, with the onshore winds, temperatures just 11 celsius, quite cool. in contrast to that, the warmest place in the uk was here, managing 19 celsius, not far behind that for west wales, 18.6 celsius in a couple of spots. now at the moment, cloud is tending to melt away across england and wales, the thickest cloud over

the next few hours across the north west of the uk, where you might find an odd spot of rain, but it's not really going to amount to much, quite mild for western areas to start the day. quite chilly in the east with temperatures starting off wednesday morning down into low single figures. now, i think by and large for wednesday, there should be more in the way of sunshine to look forward to across england and wales. after a cloudy start in northern ireland, we should see some bright or sunny spells developing here. i wouldn't rule out a bit of rain, though, into the far north west of scotland, where it will continue to be quite cool. temperatures across england and wales for the most part, 15—18 celsius. so i think that will feel pleasant in the may sunshine. but then we start to see some changes coming up from the south west for thursday as a weather front approaches, and that is going to be spreading some rain. could be quite heavy as well for a time across southwest england before later in the day, the rain edges into parts of wales and the west midlands, probably. there will be some drier and brighter weather ahead of that, and temperatures could still reach around 18 celsius, but it will continue to feel quite cool across eastern scotland and northeast england with the winds coming in off the chilly north sea. now for friday, there's a general

downward spiral into more unsettled weather conditions with heavy showers or even some longer spells of rain. the air, though, is relatively mild with the winds coming up from a south westerly direction, 18 celsius, even if we don't get a great deal in the way of sunshine. but then on into the weekend, which, of course, is the coronation weekend, low pressure works up from the south west, and it does look like it will be turning increasingly unsettled. so i think rain will move into southern areas of england from the south west on saturday. so it could be quite damp for a time for the coronation. and then beyond that, we've got some heavy and thundery showers in the forecast for sunday.

live from washington. this is bbc news. welcome to viewers on pbs in america. a man is arrested outside buckingham palace after being found with shotgun cartridges. the man suspected of killing five of his neighbors in their home was arrested in texas after an extensive manhunt. uganda is parliament passes a controversial anti—gay bill. we will hear from an activist. hello i'm sumi somaskanda. let's start in london, where rehearsals have been