February 5 – Bihus.Info published an investigation entitled “We have found them. Special operation of SBU against journalists…” revealing how the Bihus team uncovered that the SBU Department of the National Security Protection was responsible for the illegal surveillance of Bihus.Info’s investigative reporters during their stay for training at a hotel in the outskirts of Kyiv.
The Bihus.Info team managed to get full cooperation with the hotel to use their security camera footage, as well as interviews with staff who recalled the SBU team that carried out the operation (while pretending to be a company having a corporate retreat event). The security camera footage revealed arrivals/departures and movements through the resort area of a group of nearly 30 people, including the cars and vehicle registrations the group used. The journalists also found where the secret cameras had been installed that illegally filmed them in their hotel rooms and saunas, and where they were afterwards removed.
The team was able to use social media to identify the leader and two other members of the team, and to discover them entering and leaving an SBU building in the center of Kyiv, and frequenting a local cafe near their office.
On February 5, at 9:32pm, immediately after the Bihus.info investigation was posted, the SBU commented that combating organized drug crimes was one of the areas of activity of the SBU department which surveilled over Bihus.Info. The statement also said that the SBU had opened a criminal proceeding under Article 359 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (illegal acquisition, sale, or use of special technical means of obtaining information).
On February 5, late in the evening, Liga.net published a summary of its journalists’ conversation with a source at the SBU who told them that the head of the SBU department which illegally surveilled the Bihus.info team, Roman Semenchenko, was fired on January 31 – directly after the scandal broke in the media. “The position of the SBU leadership is clear – the actions of individual employees cannot cast a shadow on the entire SBU, which does so much during the war: from blowing up the Crimean bridge and conducting unique special operations to eliminate war criminals on the territory of the Russian Federation. Therefore, the personnel who followed Denys Bihus’ newsroom should definitely be held accountable. At the very least, they should be sent to the front,” the source said.
More on Detector Media in Ukrainian and on Liga.net in Ukrainian.
The Bihus.info story is here and English subtitles should be available soon.
Image: Screenshot from Bihus.info’s story.