A bored business administrator in Leicester puts the intelligence services to shame

In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a group of turquoise canisters with what appeared to be tail fins attached. He picked up one of the objects and filmed it. Later he uploaded his video to YouTube.

What were those strange turquoise cans? The answer was provided not by a UN investigator, war correspondent or military expert, but by a bored business administrator at his desk in Leicester. He had never been to Syria, spoke no Arabic and by his own admission knew nothing about weaponry. But Eliot Higgins had become fascinated by the war in Syria, and was following the social media feeds of people in the thick of it. He saw the YouTube clip and noticed the serial number ‘A-IX-2’.

Working with other online amateur weapons-spotters, Higgins figured out that the man in the video was holding a Russian-made cluster bomb. These devices detonate at high altitude, sending out a shower of smaller bombs that often land without exploding. Children are especially likely to pick them up and be killed by cluster munitions, and for that reason they are illegal in many countries. By interrogating the contents of a single YouTube clip, Higgins had established that the Syrian government was using illegal, Russian-supplied cluster bombs against its own people. He published his findings online.

Then came the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta, the rebel-held suburb of Damascus, in which up to 1,700 people died. Higgins found images of the rocket on social media, and a detail caught his eye: the screw cap on the warhead suggested that it had contained liquid. After more online sleuthing, he concluded that the device was a Soviet-made artillery rocket and that the warhead had contained the nerve agent sarin.