Five videos portraying a gruesome series of events appeared online in early March. First published by Tigrai Media House, a media outlet affiliated with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), they depict the detention and eventual execution of a group of unarmed men purportedly in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where a non-international armed conflict has been taking place since November 2020. Under international humanitarian law, the executions depicted in the videos would constitute the war crime of murder. The events were documented by a member of the Ethiopian military turned whistle-blower using a camera phone. Four of the clips show the same location, while the fifth shows a different location with men held captive by Ethiopian troops. 

Amnesty International’s Digital Verification Corps (DVC) was set up in 2016 to address three main challenges. 

Tools needed: InVid-WeVerify plugin installed in Chrome or Firefox