Ex-Bellingcat porn researcher commits suicide after conviction for abusing daughter – media

Daniel Romein, a former operative of the group, had also once been convicted of child porn possession

A former Bellingcat operative known under the alias Daniel Romein took his life in 2022 after being sentenced to prison for sexually abusing his own daughter, according to a recent bombshell revelation.

Romein had been involved in the investigation of the MH17 crash by the Western-funded “open-source intelligence” group, as well as in the Stop Child Abuse initiative, dedicated to geolocating explicit materials involving minors.

The news was first made public by independent Dutch journalist Eric Van De Beek last month, and the surrounding events were further explored in a piece released by The Grayzone last Friday.

Van De Beek said that Romein hadn't died from “cardiac arrest” in December 2022 as previously reported, stating a close friend had confirmed that the Bellingcat operative had taken his own life.

The child porn researcher, who worked for Bellingcat between 2014 and late 2019, was sentenced to 36 months in prison earlier that year for prolonged sexual abuse of his daughter, the journalist claimed, citing an anonymized court case on the matter. The case was released by Dutch authorities only in March of this year after repeated inquiries by independent media, Van De Beek noted.

The case details the way the defendant abused his daughter when she was six to 10 years old, which involved oral sex, genital rubbing, and other sexualized behavior. The events took place roughly between October 2011 and October 2016. The crimes only came to light several years later, when the girl told her mother and stepfather.

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The court’s materials quote a lackluster letter of apology sent by the defendant to his daughter when the scandal became public, in which he appeared to blame her.

The case also revealed that the defendant had been convicted of possession of child pornography “over 15 years” prior.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, when questioned by The Grayzone, denied that Romein’s firing in December 2019 had been related to his criminal past.

However, the group’s founder “tacitly acknowledged” that the researcher had been the target of sexual abuse allegations. “It is not clear whether the [court] judgment is about Mr. Romein, as it is anonymized,” he told the outlet in a mailed statement.

In August 2021, Romein was stripped of his European Press Prize, which had been awarded for his work on the Stop Child Abuse project. At the time, the Netherlands-based non-profit cited “unidentified substantiated complaints” from different individuals as the reason for its decision.

When asked by The Grayzone if the complaints were related to sexual abuse, Higgins stated they were due to the researcher’s “unacceptable online behavior.”

Despite advertising itself as an investigative group specializing in fact-checking and open-source intelligence, Bellingcat has received funding from several Western governments.

This has raised questions about its credibility, and Moscow contends that it works closely with Western intelligence services to “put pressure on either [Russia] or individuals and entities.”