Armed with an internet connection and his Twitter account, Sky New’s reporter Mark Stone uncovered the truth about a NATO airstrike that supposedly killed a number of Libyan civilians last week.
After the attack in the town of Brega, Libyan government spokesman Moussa Ibrahim claimed the strategic airstrike killed several imams in a guesthouse. Stone noticed this report did not jibe with the images of the dead which were clothed in traditional and not religious garb. An inside source from NATO also claimed the attack was on a command and control structure. After posting these conflicting reports on Twitter, Stone’s feed went wild.
His Twitter followers and other people he had never met helped him find the location of a bunker in the same area as the airstrike. The bunker information came from an obscure online interview with Dutch engineer Freek Landmeter who helped build the the structure in the 1980s. At the same time, Stone got the exact GPS coordinates of the supposed Imam guest house from the government and plugged both locations into Google Earth. Much to his surprise the bunker and the guesthouse were right next to each other.
Still sitting in his hotel room, Stone chatted with the Dutch engineer via Skype and discovered the guesthouse actually sat on top of a larger underground communications bunker created in 1988 for Qaddafi in case of an attack. [The Atlantic]