The 2023 implosion of the Titan submersible shocked the world. In collaboration with Radio-Canada’s program, Enquête, The Fifth Estate investigates how an experimental sub was allowed to take passengers to one of the most unforgiving places in the ocean to explore the Titanic wreck. Also, how they did it via the port in St. John's Newfoundland, one of the most monitored and regulated harbours in Canada. 

Canadian authorities watched an experimental submersible come and go from St. John’s Harbour for three years before it imploded with five passengers onboard as they made their way toward the wreck of the Titanic.

Major grocery CEOs are called before Parliament as Canadians struggle with the high cost of food — except the heads of stores in the North. The Fifth Estate, in partnership with APTN Investigates, looks at what’s behind the high food prices consumers face, who’s profiting and whether companies are being held accountable. 

Questions emerge over how retailer sets prices, but the Northwest Company says it tries to protect consumers from high costs.

Dances with Wolves actor Nathan Chasing Horse is set to stand trial in Nevada for alleged sexual abuse inside The Circle – what police have described as a cult. But survivors in Canada say their reports have been ignored for years.

We dig deeper into the allegations that some members of Hockey Canada’s 2018 world junior team took part in a group sexual assault. We unpack a history that suggests a pattern of abuse and look at why a charity has so much money stashed away.

As demonstrations in Iran continue and its government executes protesters, The Fifth Estate sits down with Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad to examine how the regime tries to silence dissidents abroad.

Classified documents discovered in former U.S. president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are the subject of a criminal investigation in the United States. We reveal why these documents also set off alarm bells with intelligence sources in Ottawa over whether secrets important to Canada were left unprotected.

Our investigation reveals more than $1 billion raised by the Mormon church in Canada has been funnelled to the U.S. rather than going to charitable works in this country. We hear from former members in Canada and elsewhere who say concerns about how money is spent have led them to leave the church.

Hockey Canada is on the defensive over allegations that some members of its gold-medal winning world junior team in 2018 took part in a group sexual assault. The Fifth Estate examines the national shame inside Canada’s game and the disturbing history that suggests this may not have been an isolated incident.

Nearly one in three Canadians rents their home. Rental prices are skyrocketing, leading to the same kinds of bidding wars and disappointments that home buyers are facing. The Fifth Estate examines what’s driving rental prices up and some people out of their homes, including the growing trend of large investment companies buying up rental properties across the country.

Our investigation reveals how months of planning drew convoys to Canada’s capital, leading to an unprecedented weeks-long occupation of some streets around Parliament Hill. It spawned spinoff protests across the country and around the world. The protests were ostensibly about a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for truckers, but 90 per cent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. The movement drew other actors with goals far beyond vaccine mandates and links to hate groups and white supremacists. 

The Fifth Estate analyses leaked tapes from a white supremacist hate group to expose its ideology and how it sought to recruit members of the Canadian military. In Base of hate: Inside accelerationism, we hear for the first time from the infiltrator who leaked the tapes about how these groups function and evolve.

Watch as volunteer veterans groups run a real-time escape attempt to get Afghans who helped the Canadian military out of the country. Privately funded rescue missions have continued since the Taliban captured Afghanistan and Canada stopped airlifting civilians out this summer.

Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, told BIRN  that Serbia and Kosovo may have retreated from a point where a deal to  settle relations was close. The fears associated with a potential land  swap are “exaggerated”, he said, and revealed that “serious” Europeans  were also looking at the idea.

An improvised bomb found last week strapped to a teddy bear in the  Libyan capital featured a mortar shell produced last year in Serbia.  Despite an arms embargo, Serbian weapons are still finding their way to  the North African country.

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Out of the spotlight, companies linked with Bojan Kisic secured lucrative contracts with several state companies and ministries, including a three-million-euro deal to maintain Serbia’s integrated health information system. The software handles the most sensitive private information of the Serbian public health-care system. 

BIRN can reveal that since 2013, the NITES companies have been awarded at least 27 public contracts worth around 26.8 million euros in Serbia, either bidding alone or in consortiums.

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Hailed in Serbia as the ‘deal of the century’, the 2008 arms agreement saw Serbia agree to export  pistols, bullet-proof vests, ballistic equipment, mortars, Lasta  military training aircrafts and military-grade tear gas grenades to  Iraqi forces trying to prop up the government against still-fierce  sectarian fighting.

The  40 mm M99 grenades – far heavier than the tear gas canisters used by  police forces around the world to control civil unrest – arrived in four  shipments in 2009, BIRN reveals.

A decade later, they were used  by Iraqi government forces to disperse anti-government protesters in the  Iraqi capital, to deadly effect.

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Krasimir Dachev recalls the day in 2016 when  he was approached with a request to help bankroll a Live Aid-inspired  concert in his native Bulgaria to raise money for child victims of war.

Dachev,  a wealthy businessman with interests in engineering and wood  industries, coughed up 1.5 million euros, lured by the plan to bring  some of the biggest names in music to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in a  once-in-a-generation event the likes of which the small Balkan country  had never seen.

“We were  going to put Bulgaria on the world map,” he told BIRN. Mick Jagger and  Earth, Wind and Fire, perhaps Sting, were lined up to perform on October  1, 2016, or so he thought.

The concert, however, never happened. Yet Dachev’s money was gone.

In an August deal revealed last week, American celebrity drummer Robin DiMaggio signed a plea agreement   in a Los Angeles court in which he admitted spending much of the money  on settling an alimony debt to his ex-wife, on cars for his mother and  son, clothing and far-flung travels, having promised to bring Jagger and  others to Sofia.

Using  court papers a number of related cases, BIRN has pieced together a saga  of deceit that, far from putting Bulgaria on the map, left only a trail  of lawsuits, squandered cash and the prospect of DiMaggio spending up to  20 years behind bars.

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In the early hours of March 16, 2015, a fishing boat named the Zahra  moored metres off a rocky, remote stretch of Messara Bay, on the  southern coast of the Greek island of Crete.

The Zahra sailed  under the flag of the African island nation of Sao Tome and Principe.  Its crew was Ukrainian and its cargo – 34 million cigarettes – had  likely been produced in Bosnia and Greece for companies based in Kosovo  before being sold to a Liberian offshore firm based in the Montenegrin  port of Bar.

The cargo’s final destination was, on paper, Libya,  but waiting on the shore of Crete was a convoy of trucks ready to  receive the cigarettes via conveyor belt, before fanning out across the  European Union.

It was smuggling operation with links across the globe.

Using  shipping notes, leaked emails and law enforcement reports, the Balkan  Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, has uncovered that up to 840  million so-called ‘cheap white’ cigarettes have been exported from  Montenegro by a clutch of mostly offshore firms using similar routes and  often the same ‘ghost’ fishing boats or small cargo ships, sailing the  Mediterranean without transmitting their positions. Most shipments  listed Libya as their final destination, but Egypt, North Cyprus and  Lebanon also featured.

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It has flown  Serbia’s prime minister to Britain to give a speech at Oxford  University, and the country’s president to Paris, Davos and Brussels.

Yet  the Serbian state has no public record of any official tender or  payment for the $6 million private jet that the Serbian government has  been using for the past six months, BIRN can reveal.

What  is known is that the Embraer Legacy 600, made in 2007 and equipped with  two Rolls Royce engines, was owned by Itaubank Leasing and used by EMS  S/A, the largest pharmaceutical company in Brazil, until July 9 2018,  eight months after a Luxembourg-based affiliate of the company won a  tender to buy Serbia’s ailing state-owned drugmaker Galenika for 16  million euros.

On that July  day, the EMS S/A contract to lease the plane from Brazil’s Itaubank  Leasing was marked as “expired”. After the whole procedure was over, and  the plane was flown over the Atlantic to Paris and then to Belgrade,  the Serbian government was registered as the new owner, according to  papers obtained by BIRN in October 2018. 

Serbia’s  public procurement portal has no record of any public procurement  procedure for the plane and the country’s Treasury administration has no  information on any payment being made by any Serbian state institution  to either EMS S/A, the plane’s previous user, or Brazil’s ItauBank  Leasing, which leased the plane to EMS S/A.

Planes  often change hands. Individuals, companies, and governments trade them  daily. But transparency experts say the circumstances surrounding  Serbia’s procurement of its new official jet raise red flags.

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Egypt’s No. 1 brand of cigarette, Cleopatra, was born in 1961 when  Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser asked for a local version of the  smuggled American Kent brand he liked to smoke.

Created by the  century-old Eastern Company S.A.E., Cleopatra is now one of the most  widely smoked cigarettes in North Africa and one of the top sellers  globally.

So it is perhaps ironic, given its copycat roots, that  the brand should be undercut by a state-owned factory across the  Mediterranean in Montenegro, a former Yugoslav republic negotiating to  join the European Union.

But that is precisely what authorities in  Egypt, Britain and the European Union flagged for four years, according  to confidential correspondence obtained by reporters from Balkan  Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and Arab Reporters for  Investigative Journalism, ARIJ.

And Montenegro ignored them.

The  warnings, BIRN/ARIJ can reveal, went to the highest echelons of the  Montenegrin government, raising questions over the country’s claim to  have turned a page on the 1990s, when cigarette smuggling was  effectively a government-sponsored means of financial survival amid the  war and sanctions of Yugoslavia’s bloody collapse.

It also speaks  to the scale of the task to ready Montenegro, an Adriatic country of  620,000 people, for accession to the EU after almost three decades of  rule of by the same party and, effectively, the same man – President  Milo Djukanovic.

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The UK suspected that almost 30 million Bosnian-made bullets sold to  Saudi Arabia would end up in the wrong hands, but failed to warn  Sarajevo before the shipment had flown, Balkan Investigative Reporting  Network can reveal.

The deal was brought to the UK’s attention  because two British-based brokers had requested – and were eventually  refused – licences to mediate the Bosnia-Saudi deal.

Though  Bosnian officials said it had no record of a broker being involved in  the export, a BIRN investigation has established the shipment that left  Bosnia in two parts in November 2015 and January 2016 with the approval  of Sarajevo matched the deal for which the UK refused brokering licences  in terms of timing, quantity, origin, destination and type of  ammunition.

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When militant Christian campaigner Jim Dowson was banned from Hungary in April 2017 for posing a “danger to national security”, he was able to protest his innocence – and even appeal for funds for his legal defence – across a sprawling network of websites and social media pages which dwarfs many mainstream media outlets and political parties.

Research by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, which collaborated with the BBC for this investigation, has found that at the centre of this lucrative spider’s web of patriotic sites is the Knights Templar International (KTI) portal, which is named after the famous Medieval Christian crusaders and is closely tied to Dowson, although he denies having any official role in the organisation.

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“As a widow, all you care about is getting the body back, so I just kept saying, ‘Make sure nothing more happens, make sure they take care of him,’” Ziecha Norwillo explained from her home in Texas, recalling the chaotic days following the death in Bulgaria of her husband in June 2015.

“All I wanted, and his sister wanted, is recognition – knowing that it was Francis.”

But she was denied that chance after the body was handled “worse than a wild animal”, according to the funeral director who recently spoke to Ziecha.

Francis Norwillo, aged 41, died after a grenade, which was more than 30 years old, exploded in his hand at a Bulgarian firing range.

He was in Bulgaria on Pentagon business. A private contractor for a firm called Skybridge Tactical, he was brought in to help build a curriculum to train Syrian rebels in the use of Soviet-style weaponry.

It was the first stage of “Syria Train and Equip” programme, a secretive US project to crush Islamic state, ISIS.

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The Pentagon is planning to spend $162.5 million on weapons,  ammunition and other equipment in 2019 to arm Syrian forces fighting  Islamic State, ISIS, a recently released budget report reveals.

The  amount comes on top of the $2.2 billion already designated by the US  for arms to Syrian fighters [and other Pentagon-backed groups] from  former Eastern Bloc countries – which BIRN revealed in investigation in September last year.

The  operation of arming Syrian rebels already on the ground with former  Eastern Bloc arms and ammunition, known as the Syria Train and Equip  programme, has drawn almost entirely from the Balkans and Central Europe  to date, a trend that is likely to continue throughout 2018 and 2019.

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High above the flashpoint town of Mitrovica, to the north of the Ibar  river that divides Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, stands the modern  Sveti Dimitrije church.

On a September night this year, the leader  of an obscure Serb pro-monarchy group, the Order of the Dragon, posed  for a photograph on the hilltop with an aid package for the area’s Serb  population: tactical vests, drone and military fatigues.

Dejan  Damnjanovic, the Order’s leader, posted the photo on his Facebook page  with a warning that “action instead of demagogy” was needed in  preparation for the outcome of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s  proposed ‘national discussion’ on the future of Kosovo.

While  Damnjanovic suggested that he posted the photograph publicly in order to  deliver a message, the Order’s representative in Kosovo told BIRN that  the equipment was intended to be used in a game called ‘airsoft’, which  involves replica military equipment.

The photograph was removed from his profile as BIRN went to press.

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Low-cost airlines packed with sun-seekers are the norm for Rijeka airport on the Croatian island of Krk.

But  since April, they have been sharing a runway with vast cargo planes  carrying munitions and unidentified military supplies for the Pentagon’s  wars in the Middle East, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network has  discovered.

Reporters have identified 14 cargo flights in the  past six months carrying, or probably carrying, Eastern Bloc-style  weapons and ammunition for the US military.

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“You just gotta be smarter than the government,” boasted arms dealer  Marc Morales to an undercover FBI agent in 2008. He was explaining how  he had secured lucrative arms deals abroad by giving so-called  commissions — including armoured cars — to intermediaries.  

Following  the sting, Morales was indicted alongside 21 others for bribing a  foreign official but the trial in Washington DC collapsed in 2011 as a  series of juries struggled to reach verdicts.

Today,  his new firm, Global Ordnance, is one of the most important players in  the Pentagon’s supply-line arming Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic  State in Iraq and Syria, ISIS.

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Serbia’s Ministry of Trade and the state-owned ammunition producer  Krusik have revealed that mortars found with a Kurdish militia in Syria  were from a batch sold, almost in its entirety, to the Pentagon’s  Special Operations Command, SOCOM.

SOCOM, which is responsible for securing weapons for US-backed rebels fighting ISIS in Syria,  has denied buying the mortar shells despite being presented with  statements from Krusik and the Serbian ministry, as well as leaked  Pentagon shipping documents, which support the claim.

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The Pentagon is on a spending spree as it scrabbles to amass vast  quantities of Soviet-style weapons and ammunition. But it’s running into  problems sourcing them, and is using misleading legal documents to  disguise their final destination: Syria.

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Albert Veliu’s day job was as an employee of Kosovo’s Foreign  Ministry, driving Kosovo Consul Teuta Sahatqija around the  traffic-choked streets of New York.

However, according to charges  levelled against him in a Brooklyn courthouse on Tuesday, he also ran a  lucrative operation as a weapons runner, drug dealer and money  launderer, while maintaining ties to the Cosa Nostra and to Albanian  organized crime figures in New York and the Czech Republic.

As  part of a Drug Enforcement Agency DEA sting, Veliu is alleged to have  sold an undercover agent 15 AK-47s and a Yugoslav-era Zolja anti-tank  rocket launcher.

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Wearing trainers, faded jeans and a sweater emblazoned with the word “Life”, 23-year-old Salam (not his real name) posed in February 2016 with his latest kit – a heavy machine gun, fresh off the production line, and recently delivered to his battalion of the Free Syrian Army.

The photos, posted to the fighter’s Facebook profile, did not immediately stand out amid the stream of selfies-with-weapons emanating from Syria’s warring factions.

Where the gun was produced and how it had travelled to a dusty courtyard in northern Syria was of little interest to the men from the 13th Division fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Aleppo. For Salam, it was simply the newest and best weapon he had received  since the start of the conflict.

But its distinctive shape and pristine condition soon roused the attention of online weapons experts who suggested it was a newly made M02 Coyote, produced in the Zastava Arms plant in Kragujevac, Serbia.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, OCCRP, has uncovered how the powerful weapon made a trip of around 6,000 kilometres from state-owned Zastava’s production line to Salam, as part of a delivery of up to 205 guns in 2015 and 2016 to the Free Syrian Army – with Serbia, Bulgaria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States all playing a role.

It is the first time weapons have been traced directly from a producer in Central and Eastern Europe to Syrian rebels and provides the clearest evidence to date of an arms pipeline previously uncovered by BIRN and OCCRP.

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Albania’s state-owned arms broker sold 17.5million Chinese-made  bullets, 350 mortars, and 40,000 mortar shells in 2015 to Alguns Ltd, a  Bulgarian firm which worked on Washington’s programme to train and equip  Syrian rebels.

The firm has been linked to a fatal explosion at a  shooting range in Bulgaria in 2015 which left a Pentagon contractor  working on the Syrian project dead.

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Croatia drastically increased its sales of Yugoslav and wartime era  munitions to Saudi Arabia in 2016, despite warnings from human rights  groups that deliveries are being illegally diverted to warzones, in  breach of EU and international law.  

In the first nine  months of  last year, Zagreb sold 83 million euros ($88 million) worth of  ammunition and rocket or grenade launchers, Balkan Investigative  Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Organized Crime and Corruption  Reporting Project, OCCRP, can reveal. The figures from October to  December have yet to be published.

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A year-long investigation into how Eastern European  countries have approved the discreet sale of weapons to Middle Eastern countries that are known to  ship arms to Syria.

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Some of the biggest names in popular music – from James Blunt to  Morrissey – have graced the stage at Belgrade’s Belexpocentar,  blissfully unaware of the venue’s links to a four-billion-euro banking  fraud in faraway Kazakhstan.

An investigation by the Balkan  Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, has uncovered court material,  company documents and emails that suggest the man at the centre of one  of the world’s biggest corporate frauds, Kazakh banker and former  opposition politician Mukhtar Ablyazov, was secretly the majority  shareholder in the Belexpocentar and its neighbouring Holiday Inn hotel.'

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A leading military expert has called for a Serbian parliamentary  committee to investigate the kidnap by ISIS of two employees of  Belgrade’s embassy in Tripoli, after Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic at  the weekend revealed a new link between the incident and the arms trade.

Military  expert Aleksandar Radic told BIRN that an inquiry was needed to  establish the facts surrounding the abduction of Sladjana Stankovic and  Jovica Stepic, who died in a US airstrike on an ISIS camp where the two  were being held.

The embassy employees were seized in November by  gunmen close to ISIS who crashed into a convoy of vehicles taking  Serbia’s ambassador Oliver Potezica to neighbouring Tunisia. The  ambassador escaped unharmed.

Vucic told a press conference on  Saturday that securing a ransom from Serbia was not the kidnappers’  primary motive and connected the case to “certain arms deals”.

“There  are some other motives [for the kidnapping] which I would rather not  talk about today, and which are related to certain weapons deals,” Vucic  said.

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The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, has uncovered  evidence that notorious Serb businessman and nationalist Zvonko  Veselinovic transported material for a firm owned by prominent Kosovo  Albanians linked to the Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK.

The goods  were sold to US construction giant Bechtel and its Turkish partner  Enka, the main contractor hired to build Kosovo’s biggest ever  infrastructure project, the Pristina-Tirana highway.

Veselinovic  was formerly a member of the now disbanded Serb vigilante group Bridge  Watchers, blamed for attacks on Albanians in the divided town of  Mitrovica. He admits to playing a major role in the July 2011 unrest.

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Stricken Hypo Bank, nationalised under the weight of its colossal  debt and mountains of risky loans, handed 42m euros of loans to an  untested and opaque firm involved in a grandiose luxury tourism  development in Montenegro which remains unbuilt eight years after the  first tranche of money was handed over.

Documents seen by the  Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) reveal that Hypo Alpe  Adria knew Austrian Billionaire Martin Schlaff and Serbian tycoon Vojin  Lazarevic were linked to the scheme from the start, despite having no  formal involvement with the borrower, Bigova Bay Doo.

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A Serbian firm owned by the family of controversial Palestinian  politician Mohammed Dahlan bought the 50 hectares of land along the  Belgrade-Zagreb highway in 2006.

Public documents collected by  Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) detail how Alfursan, owned  by Dahlan’s brother and nephews, secured the 76 plots, worth  approximately 2m euros.

The news emerges as Palestinian president  Mahmoud Abbas travels to Serbia on Tuesday and Wednesday to open a new  embassy and meet top officials, including Serbian President Tomislav  Nikolic.

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A company controlled by the Serbian state has secretly handed a 75m  dollar construction contract to a consortium that has little  road-building experience and is linked to senior coalition government  partners, including the Serbia Progressive Party (SNS).

In May  last year, Serbian construction giant Energoprojekt Niskogradnja and its  holding company quietly awarded the contract to build a section of the  Chinese-funded Corridor 11 highway connecting Belgrade to Montenegro to a  consortium of three firms – Nukleus, C&LC and Inkop – according to official documents leaked to the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). 

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The Montenegrin government sold its multimillion euro defence firm to an  Israeli-Serbian consortium linked to businessmen embroiled in criminal  investigations into alleged drug smuggling, money laundering and arms  trafficking.

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The Palestinian President told BIRN he will not confront Serbia over its  award of citizenship to his arch-rival, Mohammed Dahlan - whose ties to  the Balkans are coming under scrutiny.

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Tony Blair has added Serbia to the list of countries he is paid to advise, despite his role as the chief proponent of the bombing of Belgrade in 1999.

Blair will counsel the Serbian prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, who was information minister during the war and was once such an outspoken critic of the British politician that he was listed as an editor of a book titled English Gay Fart Tony Blair.

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Observers say Mohammed Dahlan could be planning to use country as base to launch leadership challenge against Palestinian Authority leader.

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A three-part follow up documentary series “Patriotic plunder -  continued” on involvement of the highest representatives of several  Serbian governments in crime and corruption in Kosovo.

A four-part investigative documentary series “Energy (Dis)agreement” on  how Serbian government officials acted in favor of the Russian  Federation and the Russian state-owned company Gazprom.

A six-part investigative documentary series “Patriotic plunder” on  crime, corruption, smuggling operations and tax evasion schemes between  Serbia and Kosovo.