Flight of the Predator: Jet linked to Israeli spyware tycoon delivers surveillance tech from the EU to notorious Sudanese militia
AOJ71H 18 May 2022 10:26 Khartoum DOF/220518 C750 -LCLK -HSSK
On a dusty May morning in Khartoum an executive jet taxied to a halt under the blistering sun. Two jeeps with tinted windows stood ready to meet it from one of the most notorious and feared militias in the world, the Rapid Support Forces. The sleek white Cessna flew in from Cyprus and remained on the ground in Sudan’s capital for just 45 minutes, long enough to draw a disturbing line of connection between the ferocious contest for power in Sudan and a spyware scandal roiling Greece.
Details of the Cessna’s arrival, its passengers and cargo were meant to remain secret — logged in an inaccessible location, foregoing the usual procedures. The secrecy was a testament to the power of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, Sudan’s richest man and the owner of a private army that is the heir to the murderous legacy of the Janjaweed, infamous for their crimes against humanity in Sudan’s troubled Western region, Darfur.
According to three independent sources, the cargo was high-end surveillance technology, made in the European Union, with the potential to tip the balance of power in Sudan thanks to its capacity to turn smartphones into audio-visual informants on their owners. When news of its arrival reached Hemedti’s rivals the equipment was seen as so dangerous that an RSF commander speaking on condition of anonymity said it was smuggled out of Khartoum to the militia’s stronghold in Darfur to prevent its seizure by the army.
Sudan, Africa’s largest country prior to civil war and partition, is in fragile transition from decades of military dictatorship under Omar al-Bashir — now in prison awaiting possible extradition to the International Criminal Court. Waves of popular protests in Khartoum in 2019 resulted in a civilian council that shares power uneasily with the military. On paper, Hemedti is second in command to Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander in chief of Sudan’s Armed Forces. In reality, the militia leader vies for outright control of the country. He commands Sudan’s gold industry, his soldiers fight for a price in foreign conflicts and he has forged links to Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group. Hemedti also met with Israeli intelligence twice since June 2021, with a private jet used by Mossad tracked to Khartoum. In the last year alone, RSF fighters have been implicated in enforced disappearances of protestors in Khartoum and indiscriminate shooting of civilians, including children, in Darfur.
The Khartoum flight opened a rare window on a secretive and lucrative business, linking the blood-soaked Sudanese militia to a cabal of powerbrokers in Greece, a corporate network spanning Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands and Ireland, and above all to a crisis spreading across the EU — the widespread availability of sophisticated software that can track and hack mobile phones worldwide, threatening democratic institutions and human rights defenders.
Lighthouse Reports and its partners Haaretz in Israel and Greece’s Inside Story have been investigating the activities of Intellexa, a spyware firm whose activities spread from Europe across much of the global south. Months of digging into company records and interviews with confidential sources in multiple countries uncovered a network of companies connected to Tal Dilian, a former Israeli intelligence operative, who has bought up an array of sophisticated surveillance technology and established an EU foothold in Greece and Cyprus.
The eight-seater Cessna, which plays a significant role in Dilian’s operations, was revealed by a social media post from an Intellexa engineer – a selfie showing its subject aboard a jet with a grey leather and mahogany interior that left enough of a digital trail to isolate and identify that plane. Lighthouse Reports and partners have analysed and cross-referenced hundreds of flight records, linking the plane to key locations in Intellexa’s business, and combed dozens of passenger lists, along with corporate filings, employment records and other confidential and open source data. The findings conclusively connect the plane to Dilian, his known associates and employees in his company — including to Merom Harpaz, a central figure in his business network.
Intellexa, Tal Dilian and Merom Harpaz did not respond to requests for comment. No response was received from a Rapid Support Forces media inquiries address.
In tracing the movements of the Cessna in recent months as it criss-crossed Greece, Cyprus, Israel, the Middle East and Africa, the outlines emerge of an international scandal that destabilises the countries it lands in, all the while funnelling some of the world’s most dangerous technology into the hands of some of its most high-risk regimes.
“Equipping the RSF with sophisticated surveillance technology will not only exacerbate the brutal repression and killing of Sudan’s remarkably brave protestors and squash hopes for democracy in the region,” Anette Hoffmann, senior research fellow at the Clingendael Institute, told this investigation. “Such advanced spyware in the hands of the RSF will tilt the balance of power in favour of a ruthless former militia and Russia ally, bringing Sudan one step closer to an open confrontation with the country’s armed forces and increasing the risk of civil war.”
Publicity photo for the luxury villa complex where Tal Dilian lives in Cyprus
AOJ71H 18 May 2022 15:09 Larnaca DOF/220518 C750 -HSSK -LCLK
Returning from Khartoum that afternoon, the Cessna touched down in Larnaca, Cyprus, rolling to a halt outside the headquarters of a local aviation consultancy, Pegasus Flight Centre. Less than an hour’s drive away, in an exclusive suburb of Limassol, is a luxurious villa with an enticing kidney-shaped pool which the millionaire Israeli entrepreneur, Dilian, shares with his wife, Sara Hamou, a Polish corporate offshoring specialist.
Since leaving the Israeli army’s elite Unit 81 intelligence division, which he commanded, Dilian has specialised in surveillance tools. Basing himself in Cyprus, he first built a pioneering phone tracking firm called Circles, which he sold in 2014. He also went into business with an Israeli community leader in Cyprus, Abraham Shahak Avni, part owner of Pegasus Flight Centre.
For Avni, aviation is a fragment of a diverse portfolio. He describes himself as “a visionary entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist” whose interests span medical services, robotics, autonomous drones and intelligence products for law enforcement agencies. In partnership with Avni’s company CIS, Dilian set up a wifi interception firm called WiSpear, and kitted out a van with millions of dollars’ worth of surveillance equipment, which he began to exhibit at industry trade fairs in 2017.
Two years later, Dilian and Avni launched a more ambitious project: an “intelligence alliance” designed to “completely encompass” the needs of government agencies. The press release announced a “one-stop-shop”, a group of companies that could offer infection of devices and data extraction, wifi traffic interception, open source datamining, covert social media activities and phone geolocation, along with high powered big data analysis to make sense of it all.
In preparation for this Dilian had gone on a spending spree. He purchased Cytrox, a Hungarian and North Macedonian startup which developed phone hacking software called Predator. He brokered a marketing deal with French interception firm Nexa and invested in other companies in the area of cyber intelligence.
By uniting the capabilities of different industry niches under one roof Dilian hoped to rival the biggest players in the mercenary spyware market — in particular Israel’s NSO Group, now notorious for their Pegasus hacking software. The new alliance was to be called Intellexa.
Asked to explain the difference between NSO and Intellexa, a senior source in Israel’s offensive spyware industry said: “NSO worked in accordance with Israeli law and at times even on behalf of the state of Israel. Ethically both this firm and the Israeli policy were questionable as sales were made to oppressive regimes — but it was regulated. Intellexa on the other hand does not follow Israeli law and sells to similar but also worse clients — including those that are a risk to Israel’s own national interest. A company that does not abide by Israeli law and is not subject to any regulator is de facto a pirate organisation.”
In a sign of things to come, Intellexa’s birth into the world was accompanied by chaos. Dilian evidently intended it to be based in Cyprus, according to an undated name registration in the country’s corporate filing system. But before the paperwork was completed, the plan blew up in his face. In August 2019 he gave an on-camera interview to Forbes, in which he touted his multi-million dollar spy van, claiming it could “hack a smartphone and snoop on all the messages within” — even those protected by encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal. He sent a couple of colleagues off on a walk outside the van, announcing “we will trace them, we will intercept them, we will infect them.” The video, in which Harpaz can also be seen, was not well received by some factions of the Cyprus establishment who were concerned that Dilian’s operation rivalled the national intelligence agency.
Amid claims of illegal data gathering, Dilian’s employees were arrested, offices raided and equipment impounded. As warrants were issued for himself and Avni, he signalled his intention to move his base of operations elsewhere. “No company can tolerate an unstable business and legal environment, which does not provide any protection against rumours affecting corporate activities,” he said.
Faced with arrest by the Cypriot authorities, Dilian was eager for a new corporate home and he had already been putting the foundations in place since 2019 a short plane-ride away in Greece. As the police investigation into his activities in Cyprus gathered pace, Dilian had already been reorganising his business and putting Intellexa to work on behalf of his new hosts.
Photos: Reuters/Yiannis Kourtoglou, Ints Kalnins, AP/Yiannis Panagopoulos, Wikipedia, social media profiles. Art: Haaretz
AOJ71H 12 April 2022 18:41 Athens DOF/220412 C750 -LCLK -LGAV
The Cessna arrived in Athens the day after the fuse was lit on a slow-burning scandal that would come to engulf the whole of Greece’s political elite, one of its leading businessmen and a handful of other notables. The fuse was Thanasis Koukakis, a veteran business reporter described by colleagues as “dogged”, who has worked with international media including the Financial Times.
Koukakis had long suspected that his phone was tapped but discovered instead that it was also infected with Intellexa’s Predator software. Whereas spying on journalists might have provoked an outcry elsewhere in the EU, Greece is now the lowest placed European country in the rankings on media freedom published by the international watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Koukakis turned to Inside Story, a partner in this investigation, and one of the few independent investigative teams in Athens. They verified the reporter’s account, assembled the evidence and put the story out but it was largely ignored.
The Greek government denied any knowledge of Predator, blaming private actors, while its supporters in the domestic media rubbished Koukakis’ claims of a deeper scandal, saying there was no evidence of other victims. Three days after the Predator revelation a second report emerged, this time from Reporters United – another pillar of Greece’s nascent investigative scene. It published documents that showed Koukakis had been wiretapped by Greece’s intelligence agency (EYP) a year prior to his phone being infected with spyware.
The government refused to elaborate on the “national security” concerns that prompted them to intercept the calls of a respected journalist. And the EYP connection was even more troubling as the conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis had changed the law within days of coming into power in 2019 to bring the intelligence agency under the direct control and oversight of the prime minister’s office — an office overseen by Mitsotakis’ own nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis. This is the same Dimitriadis whom senior sources in Israel’s cyber industry said had previously held talks with NSO, the vendor of Pegasus.
Koukakis never believed he was alone in being targeted: “From the beginning, I considered it unlikely that such a complicated technical monitoring structure as Predator would have been set up by the Greek government to monitor only one journalist.”
The suggestion that Predator was trained on a single individual was rendered even less credible in the light of a cluster of internet domains, attributed to Intellexa’s subsidiary Cytrox, exposed by researchers from Meta and Citizen Lab, housed at the University of Toronto, Canada. This included dozens of domains mimicking Greek news sites. Lighthouse Reports used a domain intelligence database to catalogue the creation dates of the Greek lookalikes and discovered an ongoing campaign of fake news site registration, running from summer 2020. While the domains masqueraded as legitimate news sources they were in fact malicious sites that injected malware into the devices of unsuspecting visitors. Koukakis’ phone was infected after clicking on one of these links.
Documents seen by this investigation show that many of these infected domains were registered by a developer and known associate of Tal Dilian in the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, company records show that, as he moved his office out of Cyprus, Dilian had assembled a bewildering tapestry of Intellexa-linked companies spanning multiple other countries.
Dilian created his corporate network through a number of intermediaries — principally Hamou, a former senior advisor at an offshore trust specialist, but also Felix Bitzios, a businessman whose work on bad debts at Piraeus Bank was the subject of Koukakis’ reporting in 2019. Three companies called Intellexa were registered, in Greece, Ireland and the British Virgin Islands. All three were owned by an Irish holding company, Thalestris. As Inside Story dug into company registers in Greece and Cyprus they found that Thalestris also controlled companies named Apollo, Hermes, Mistrona, Dernova, Lorenco and Feroveno — some of which were seemingly registered to a rubble-strewn vacant lot in downtown Limassol. Thalestris, in turn, was partly dependent on money from another Virgin Islands entity, Chadera Enterprises, which — behind a veil of anonymity — was ultimately controlled by Dilian and two of his associates, leaked documents reveal.
Although the Thalestris holding company kept control of most of these Greek and Cypriot subsidiaries, there were two exceptions when key associates of Dilian’s work in Greece were given a piece of the pie, corporate filings reveal. Lorenco was sold to Intellexa’s top executive in Greece, Merom Harpaz, while a 35% stake in the Greek Intellexa company went to Dilian’s fixer, Felix Bitzios, via another Cyprus-based company, Santinomo.
The baffling structure served to obfuscate the links between Dilian and Intellexa, shrouding the group’s accounts in a near-impenetrable smokescreen. But on the ground, some facts remained the same as before. Feroveno, for example, shares a telephone number with Avni’s personal assistant — who corresponded with executives of Italy’s Hacking Team about the purchase of interception software in 2013; who wrote on behalf of Dilian requesting Cypriot government assistance in closing a deal with the Netherlands in 2019; and who also acts as operations director of Pegasus Flight Centre, outside which the white Cessna parked on its return from Sudan.
Following months of meticulous paperwork, Dilian’s arrival in Greece seemed to meet with success. The company’s Greek office near the abandoned airport and former refugee camp, Hellinikon, grew rapidly, expanding to a dozen employees. It was also used as a training centre and even had an area with prayer mats for those coming from Muslim countries. Flight records show the Cessna shuttling regularly between Athens, Larnaca and potential clients in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The Clarion Congress Hotel, Prague, site of ISS World Europe
AOJ71H 15 June 2022 8:01 Prague DOF/220615 C750 -LCLK -LKPR
As the white Cessna parked up in the Czech capital it was not alone on the tarmac. Delegates at the ISS World conference, hosted in an imposing business hotel east of Prague’s historic centre, were jetting in for Europe’s premier spyware trade fair. Sometimes known as the “souk of spooks”, it is a bustling marketplace for police and intelligence agencies from around the world to purchase new tools, and for the intercept companies to demonstrate them. Attendance is strictly limited to government employees and contractors, who rub shoulders and talk shop over colourful smoothies, flutes of sparkling wine and dainty pastries.
This year’s get-together came at a time of heightened European concern about the surveillance industry. The previous summer, a media consortium had thrown a spotlight on NSO Group’s Pegasus software, showing how it had been indiscriminately used by the company’s clients to hack the phones of human rights activists, politicians and journalists. As a result, the company had been sanctioned by the US and was now — along with the industry as a whole — the target of an ongoing inquiry at the European Parliament. At the opening ceremony In Prague, however, the industry’s bête noir was warmly welcomed as “the very famous NSO Group”.
Behind closed doors, salespeople gave government delegates demos of how their products could gather WhatsApp contact data, hoover up internet browsing records and track and hack phones. There were so many interception devices at work in the space that delegates’ phones weren’t functioning properly. “I can only get 2G reception,” one of the trainers complained, referencing the downgrading of mobile signal that often accompanies attempts to grab personal data from a device. Others preferred to just leave their phones at home. Slogans around the room promised the prevention of “past and future crimes”, a safer world, and the ultimate triumph of truth and justice. Intellexa, one of the event’s sponsors, shared a thronged back room with rivals like Rayzone, Septier, Cleartrail and NSO.
A leaked business proposal — dated shortly after the Prague fair — outlined the capabilities of Dilian’s new flagship product. Predator was expanded and rebranded as the Nova Remote Intelligence and Analytics Solution. The system comprised “a fully functional standalone cyber intelligence platform with social engineering tools.” This is industry jargon for tools which fool people into clicking on malicious links, thinking they come from friends or other trusted sources. It offered “one-click infection via multiple attack vectors”, licenced for 10 targets at once, with a “magazine of 100 successful infections”. The price tag, including “remote data extraction”, project management and 12 months warranty, was $8 million.
Intellexa was clocking up air miles in the search for customers. In the months leading up to Prague, the white Cessna set off from Greece and Cyprus to visit Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Confidential documentation seen by Lighthouse Reports and partners shows that the company was also pushing hard for deals in Africa, and had engaged a network of known arms dealers to offer its products across the continent. As well as Sudan, the target client list included Mozambique, Angola, Kenya and Equatorial Guinea.
Inside the EU, governments are supposed to regulate any sales of surveillance technology to other countries. But authorities in Greece and Cyprus, when approached for this investigation, refused to disclose whether Intellexa or its associated companies have either applied for, or received, the requisite legal paperwork to actually carry out any non-EU sales.
The most recent set of published accounts for Thalestris, Intellexa’s Irish holding company, declared $35.6m of sales, over three quarters of which were in the Middle East. But two sources with knowledge of the company’s finances said that it had made sales of nearer $200m over the last three years.
While Intellexa’s stock was high at the industry event in Prague its activities on the ground were once again destabilising its host country. Since the revelation of the hacking of the journalist Koukakis in April, the Greek government repeatedly denied any role in or knowledge of the spyware operation. But Greece’s small independent media organisations refused to let go of the story, and its denials were looking increasingly threadbare.
RSF fighters in Darfur: Klaas Van Dijken, Lighthouse Reports
AOJ71H 4 August 2022 15:12 Tel Aviv DOF/220804 C750 -LGKR -LLBG
The arrival of the white Cessna in Tel Aviv was not unusual. Along with Athens and Larnaca, Ben Gurion airport was its most regular stopover. But what happened next was highly unusual, as the jet remained on the ground for 10 weeks. Back in Athens, what was now becoming known as “Greece’s Watergate” was reaching boiling point.
The effort to portray Koukakis as an isolated victim fell apart on July 26 when opposition leader and MEP Nikos Androulakis had his phone checked at the European Parliament as part of a security sweep. The device was found to have received the same infected message as Koukakis. Three days later Greece’s intelligence agency admitted it had also spied on Androulakis, leader of the socialist PASOK party, for a period in 2021, a repeat of the same doubling up of eavesdropping technologies that Koukakis suffered.
Meanwhile, Grigoris Dimitriadis, the prime minister’s nephew, de facto head of his office and overseer of the Greek intelligence agency, had been identified as the government’s connection to the spyware scandal in early June.
Now, as the Cessna sat on the tarmac at Ben Gurion, Reporters United produced evidence of his business links to Felix Bitzios, Dilian’s fixer and the part owner of Intellexa in Greece.
The “tall guy”, as Dimitriadis is referred to in the Greek press, resigned without giving any reason on August 5. The head of Greece’s intelligence agency, Panagiotis Kontoleon, followed suit. The government denied Dimitriadis’ exit had anything to do with Intellexa’s activities and said Kontoleon stepped down owing to failures in legal surveillance activities.
GRIGORIS DIMITRIADIS AND FELIX BITZIOS DID NOT RESPOND TO REQUESTS FOR COMMENT.
The two departures came as a jolt after a series of supine domestic investigations had skirted the core issue of who was operating the Predator hacking software in Greece. The Greek National Transparency Authority, one of three official probes, concluded that there was no contract between the state and Intellexa but did this without looking at Intellexa’s bank accounts. It delayed two months before visiting the company’s offices and failed to meet with any of its legal representatives. Similar shortcomings marked the parliamentary inquiry, led by members of the ruling party, which refused to call key witnesses, and in October cleared the prime minister of any knowledge of the spying affair.
The emerging crisis in Greece also dragged the attention of a European parliamentary committee away from the Pegasus scandal it had been set up to probe. In early September the PEGA inquiry staged a hearing in Brussels on events in Greece where Koukakis gave testimony. In early November its members spent four days in Greece and Cyprus seeking evidence on whether European laws had been broken. A senior Greek government official, who asked not to be named, summed up the contempt in which the mission was held: “We piss on PEGA,” he said.
PEGA’s rapporteur, Sophie in ‘t Veld, described the Greek government denials as “implausible” and asked why there has been no police investigation into Predator. As it stands, “it’s like catching somebody with their lips covered in chocolate and crumbs, claiming that they were never near the cookie jar”. The spyware market, she said, poses a threat to democratic institutions in Europe and around the world. “This stuff is like gangrene. It will infect one part of the body and then spread. You cannot contain it.”
With any strategy to contain the scandal now in tatters and the circumstantial evidence all-but overwhelming the Greek prime minister’s repeated denials, the corrosive effect of powerful spyware technology on even developed democracies is on full show. On November 5 the tabloid newspaper Documento published the first 35 names on what it claims is the full list of the Predator targets in Greece. Every Sunday the roll call is added to and now includes serving cabinet ministers, the inner circle of a powerful shipping and media tycoon, a popular comedian, friends of the prime minister’s wife, senior military figures and the country’s most respected newspaper editor. The list goes on.
While this new Sunday ritual is heavy on sex, lies and blackmail, it provides almost none of the evidence and sourcing that marked earlier independent reporting. So far none of those named have publicly confirmed whether they were infected.
Greece’s government has vowed to impose some form of ban on the sale of spyware but has not moved with any seriousness to close down the spyware operator on its doorstep. The white Cessna has resumed its shuttle runs with brief stops in North Africa and Switzerland. Four thousand kilometres away to the south and east in Sudan’s Jebel Marra, the mountain range that rises above Darfur, sources confirm that the surveillance system, bought from a company headquartered in the EU, is now operational.
Here’s the price for your new H&M clothes
DHAKA.
If Soma Akhter, 25, wanted to, she could predict the colour of next year’s fashion.
Just look at the water under her bamboo-stilt house.
It glistens turquoise.
The water comes from the neighbouring textile factories. Soma Akhter herself worked in one of them, before she lost her job during the pandemic. She knows she will need to find a livelihood there again soon.
Every evening, an hour after sunset, the dirtiest water is released.
The kind that leaves its froth clinging to the vegetation and her throat swollen and raw.
The kind that leaves her unable to eat because the smell reminds her of dead bodies.
This is a story about people and water.
About melting glaciers high in the Himalayas, feeding the mighty rivers that push down through fertile plains where people have lived and farmed for thousands of years.
It’s also a story about the clothes we wear.
It may begin in an H&M store on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, where expressionless mannequins in sequin dresses gaze out at Black Friday shoppers.
Or in an Instagram feed, where the next trend is just a click away.
Fast fashion can be described in numbers. We buy 60% more garments today than in 2000 and keep each one for half as long.
Around 100 billion new garments are produced every year on Earth, or 13 for every human being. Each one is worn on average seven times. Then it’s thrown away.
Alongside China, Bangladesh has become the world’s hub for the mass production of clothing. Fast fashion accounts for almost all the country’s exports.
In addition to low wages, this poor lowland country has another competitive advantage. Cheap water.
International giants like Zara, Gap, Walmart and Levi’s have long flocked here. But the biggest buyer of all is Sweden’s H&M.
When parts of Bangladesh were hit by a power outage in early October, H&M shares plummeted on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. That’s how important the country is.
The water under Soma Akhter’s house turns magenta. Her mother Nazma, 55, peels onions to cook in the earth oven over an open fire.
Climate change destroyed the land in their home village on the Padma River and forced the family to move here. In this slum she feels uprooted and uncomfortable, but knows she can’t go back home.
Moira the goat munches on grass from a clay pot. A neighbour watches a Bollywood film at high volume.
The family came here because it’s the cheapest place to live. Just 2,000 taka, or €18, a month.
We ask who is behind the pollution – is there a connection to the H&M factory a few hundred metres away? Soma shakes her head, not daring to point fingers.
She pulls at the black and white shawl, bites on a nail. The water is now military green.
“I dream of children. But they can’t grow up here.”
A veneer of strength lies atop the fragility.
She leads the way out, across narrow planks. A slope descends straight into the canal.
Night – and with it the worst smell – are still a few hours away.
To dye clothes, and give them the right softness and texture, lots of chemicals are used. The fashion industry is now the world’s second worst polluter of rivers. Dye pigments, salts, heavy metals, ammonia, phenols and other substances are all flushed into waterways.
It is illegal to pollute water in Bangladesh. Since 2010 an environmental law has required factories that dye and wash clothes to treat their wastewater. No treatment plant, no licence.
It also violates H&M’s own standards. Customers who walk into any of the company’s 4,000-plus stores worldwide or buy online are assured that every garment is made sustainably, by factories that respect people and the environment.
Yet the factory runoff is gushing beneath Soma Akhter’s house.
It may not be widely known, but with a few purposeful clicks on H&M’s website you can find out both the country of manufacture and the name of the factory where your garment was made.
During a week in September, we click through the 3000-plus garments listed as new, in the women’s, men’s and children’s ranges.
In total, we identify 496 garments made in 96 different factories in Bangladesh. We plot them on a map. Distinct clusters emerge, an archipelago of factories.
We share the map with one of Bangladesh’s most experienced environmental journalists. He has spent many years covering water pollution and will be our guide on the ground.
The plane descends for a night landing. Scattered lanterns and fires reveal life below. Otherwise, the country, with 166 million inhabitants crammed into a third of Sweden’s land area, is invisible.
We see no motorways. No masts or flashing towers.
A few hours later, the sun will rise and the world’s sixth largest city will be transformed and filled with life.
Dhaka was founded in the fertile area between two great rivers four hundred years ago. These days, rickshaw pullers with sweaty foreheads and skinny legs crowd the congested streets, alongside Uber drivers.
They ring bells and honk horns, trying to squeeze through the chaos.
We’re here to scrutinise H&M’s clothes production. We randomly select eleven factories, which can be assumed to be representative. The first stop is Tongi, on the northern outskirts of this vast city.
The river water is up to the man’s knees. He lowers the huge scoop and pulls it up. Over and over again, and he never catches a fish.
Has no one told him that the ecosystem has collapsed? That the authorities have declared the black mire beneath us to be biologically dead?
Not so many years ago, the water here was so clear you could see the bottom, says Paresh Rabidas, a fifty-year-old shoemaker with heavy features. It was teeming with fish that he used to catch for his family.
“The textile mills have destroyed everything”, he says, frowning. “But what can we do? Go to the prime minister and complain?”
He mentions a series of factories by name. One of them is on the list of H&M’s suppliers – Mascotex.
“Their factory is across the lake”, he says, pointing.
Half an hour later, we step out onto a chaotic city street. A high barbed-wire wall separates us from the Mascotex factory.
Through the factory windows we can see the fans whirring and the stark white fluorescent tubes. Floor after floor of seamstresses.
According to H&M’s own figures, about a thousand people work there. They sew, among other things, sweaters and joggers with dinosaur prints for children, which are sold in sets for €25 in Swedish stores.
The guards follow us with their eyes. We pretend to be tourists and slip into a market.
Soon we find people who can point out the factory’s drain outlet. It runs under the street, in a closed canal, we are told.
We follow the canal for a few hundred metres, only glimpsing it through occasional openings. Eventually it joins the drains of several other factories. Deep under the surface, the conduit empties into the black river.
There’s no way to prove who let what out.
Concrete columns obstruct the roadway, and we are at a standstill for most of the journey. The remedy chosen for the city’s traffic gridlock is elevated motorways.
Construction has been going on for ten years, but seems to be making little progress. There is talk of money disappearing into pockets.
A giant hole stands out like a wound in the urban landscape.
This was the site of the Rana Plaza textile factory. On 24 April 2013, the building collapsed. At least 1,129 workers died.
The disaster drew attention to the industry’s appalling working conditions and death-trap factories. Some things have improved since then. But not the water.
We learn that there was never a plan for industrialisation. Factories have just sprung up everywhere.
Nayan Bhuiyan, second director of the environment department in Gazipur, just north of Dhaka, tells our reporter that almost all the factories that dye and wash have wastewater treatment plants. The problem is that they are not running.
“They don’t use the treatment plants if we don’t visit them,” he says.
Sometimes polluted water is discharged into the regular sewer, sometimes into secret side channels.
On our list we identify 36 factories in Gazipur that produce for the Swedish clothing chain.
Sometimes the locations on the map don’t match, but we find them a short distance away.
And again we discover underground channels. They join the pipes from other factories and run out under the surface. But the inspector’s and residents’ statements are not enough. We want to see the discharge for ourselves.
In the morning traffic it takes almost four hours to reach Sreepur, six miles north of Dhaka.
For centuries, people have built their homes along the rivers. The winds are cooling and the monsoons fill the rice fields with water.
Now the links in the story are broken. The fields, which would have secured the children’s future, are unusable.
Mariam Masuma, 14, is not supposed to be here. For as long as she can remember, she has heard the adults’ warnings.
“Don’t go down to the water.”
Last week, a cyclone swept by and rain came lashing down. The water was diluted and for a few days was a little clearer. But now, she remarks, it’s just as black again.
Mariam looks out over the beach. With her big black eyes and colourful shawl, she might have been one of the clothing chain’s models.
She says the swarms of mosquitoes that accompany the outflows make it impossible to sit outside in the evenings. That the slightest drop of water on her skin makes it itch.
“Sometimes it stings your eyes and burns your chest.”
Her grandfather Nasim waits shirtless outside the traditional mud house where he has lived all his life, a hundred metres from the beach.
“It used to be a mighty river. Boats could go here. We used to bathe in the water and drink it,” says the 70-year-old.
The pollution came with the textile factories about ten years ago.
Nasim remembers one of his cows going down to drink.
“It collapsed and died. On the spot. It was then we realised it was toxic.”
As recently as last year, he tried to grow rice again.
“It won’t grow. Everything just dies.”
The garment factories have been interested in buying the family’s land, but only for a fraction of what it is worth, says Nasim. His son, Mariam’s father, has had to take a job in one of the factories in order for the family to survive.
The monsoon continues to drench the country. And the poison is spreading.
No one from the authorities has ever tested the soil or the groundwater here. No one has checked on the health of Mariam and the other children. No one can really say how dangerous it is to live here.
A few skinny goats graze on the grass. Nasim’s face changes, becoming pleading.
“You have seen for yourself what it is like. Please do something for my grandchildren.”
There was a time when clothes were worn, mended, and mended again, until they fell apart. Today, 50 billiongarments are tossed out within a year of being made.
It is estimated that the fashion industry consumes anywhere from 20 to 200 trillion litres of fresh water. Groundwater is being depleted while huge amounts of microplastics from synthetic fibres are released and end up in fields, forests and oceans.
Under a nearby bridge, the water is forced out of a concrete pipe.
It is thick, with a red-black hue. Bubbling and fizzing, smelling of chemicals and decay at the same time.
The colour and stench are clear indicators that the water is polluted. Soon a cluster of men gathers around us. They all live in the area. They are furious.
“They are poisoning and destroying! Every day they release water in different colours, yellow, green and red,” says Helal Uddin, 35, a dapper man who works as an electricity inspector for the mayor of Sreepur.
He and the other men are in agreement: the contaminated water comes from two nearby factories that share the drain, Taqwa Fabrics and Aswad Composite Mills. Both are located just a few hundred metres away.
Taqwa makes at least six garments that are currently on sale at H&M, including a small red tricot sweater with Santa print, which sells in Swedish stores for around €4.50.
Aswad Composite Mills is also on H&M’s supplier list, although the address is for its sister factory west of Dhaka. Aswad makes, among other things, light blue tops, which sell for around €6.25.
“I’ve passed here every day since the Taqwa factory was built. I saw when they built the pipe and how two years ago they covered it and built a road on top,” says the electricity inspector.
Once, he and some other villagers tried to complain. For a few days the water was clear, then everything went back to the way it was.
“Taqwa’s representative said they had no choice but to pollute. Otherwise the factory would disappear and everyone would lose their jobs.”
And the police?
“They do nothing. They take bribes.”
We look out over a dystopian landscape of squawking birds, plastic bags and garbage. Helal says that respect for nature has been lost. When water can no longer be used, people just dump everything in it.
We make our way down to the outlet. The water feels greasy to the touch, like tar mixed with ink.
A newly built street, which runs above the canal, serves as a market. It sells papaya, ginger, beans, root vegetables and lettuce – all grown and washed in the untreated water.
Soon we’re standing outside Taqwa Fabrics. Up to four thousand people work here, according to H&M’s own figures.
A beggar with one arm sits at the gate.
To avoid being turned away, we introduce ourselves not as journalists but as hydrologists from a Swedish university. We ask why the factory is discharging dirty water.
“We actually run the treatment plant… often”, the guard says before falling silent and summoning a manager.
The gates open and close. A truck with chemicals drives in. Larger trucks with clothes roll out.
Two men emerge, and introduce themselves as engineers. They claim that it is normal for the water to be black.
And the stench?
“It… might be coming from another factory”, says one.
“Can we see the treatment plant?”
“We’ll have to ask the plant manager.”
The plant manager shows up, then turns back to whisper with the engineers. He parrots their message to us, word for word.
A visit is no longer an option.
“Email our head office.”
All around us, seamstresses stream out for their lunch break. Under the bridge, the water continues to pour out.
It is reported that, in the wake of the pandemic, the fashion industry is using colour like never before. In Western cities thousands of miles away, grave-looking models in bonbon pink are strutting down catwalks.
“Dopamine dressing” is supposed to boost neurotransmitters and make us feel good.
According to the World Bank, 72 toxic chemicals are only used in dyeing. They are implicated in various skin diseases and cancer.
Evening.
A dark room, covered in maps with waterways dotted on them. An office, in downtown Dhaka.
Sharif Jamil, one of Bangladesh’s best-known environmental activists and leader of the organisation Bapa, explains the back story: There are 30 inspectors across Dhaka to check thousands of factories.
“They don’t have the knowledge, the equipment or the capacity. The penalties are low and the corruption extreme,” he says, sipping his cardamom tea.
The tentacles of the garment industry reach deep into politics, we are told. Several ministers and dozens of parliamentarians and mayors own factories themselves.
Some industries pollute openly, others covertly. Sometimes they have two or three factories, one of which is a decent one that they show off to foreign clients.
“But everyone, or almost everyone, pollutes”, says this grey-bearded man.
It could be that the treatment systems are broken or have become undersized as production has increased. But the most common reason is money.
The chemicals required have become more expensive. The price of electricity has doubled. Running the treatment plants costs around €0.05 per litre. For a factory that uses 10,000 litres an hour, 12 hours a day, that can mean the difference between profit and loss.
“H&M is like any Western buyer. They talk a good game about the environment and working conditions one day, and the next day, when they negotiate price, they have forgotten all about it. Competition is extreme. It is a buyer’s market.”
The honking from the street intrudes, faintly, as if from another world.
“The clothes buyers don’t take responsibility. The water is being destroyed, while climate change is eating our country. It’s a disaster.”
Trend cycles are getting shorter, collections are getting tighter. The younger generation is reached through paid collaborations with influencers on Instagram. Clothes are being forced onto the market.
H&M and competitor Zara launched 11,000 new lines between January and April this year. The Chinese company Shein, which has burst into the market, launched over 300,000. There is talk that fast fashion is transitioning into something else.
Ultra-fast fashion.
They move like a mighty ocean wave through the early morning in Savar, the heart of the fashion district, west of Dhaka.
Young women, in their thousands, soon to be swallowed up behind the steel gates of factories.
We’re back in Soma Akhter’s neighbourhood, where the colours of fashion can be predicted by the colour of the wastewater.
The school is a stone’s throw from her home. The walls are covered with rainbows and photographs of the nation’s assassinated founders, icons that every child is expected to recognize.
The smell of fast fashion reaches here, too. It makes the kids cover their faces at recess.
Principal Lucky Ahmad is exasperated. During the monsoon, the schoolyard overflows and mosquitoes are everywhere.
The headmaster has demanded that the factories stop the pollution or at least erect a barrier to the river, but to no avail. Of the 342 students, at least 90 percent are children of textile workers.
“They can’t concentrate. This ruins their studies.”
We walk into a classroom, where grade five is learning English.
“Who’s making everything dirty?” we ask.
“The textile mills”, the children reply in chorus.
We talk to several residents in the neighbourhood. Here, too, the testimonies are consistent and specific: the water that runs next to the school and under Soma Akhter’s house comes from al-Muslim, a group of companies that owns several factories.
They point to the canal, which runs under a road here too.
It ends at an eleven-storey building that shades an entire block. A blackboard lists the factories inside, all owned by al-Muslim. The largest is on H&M’s list.
The A.K.M. Knitwear factory, which employs thousands of seamstresses, produces 90’s Straight Baggy Jeans, sold for around €26.50. And at least twelve other products. It washes, bleaches and dyes.
H&M makes around three billion garments every year. The figure is set to rise further.
The messaging, at least, is clear. The company is leading the way towards sustainability across the industry. In just a few years, H&M will be one hundred percent renewable and circular.
But criticism is growing. A review by the Changing Markets Foundation found that 96% of H&M’s environmental claims were unfounded or misleading. This earned the company a rock-bottom ranking.
The clothing chain’s “Conscious choice” collection, for which customers pay extra, has in some cases been found to be less sustainable than its regular range. Both Norwegian and Dutch consumer authorities have been cracking down on H&M’s environmental promises. The Swedish chain has promised to do better.
Increasingly, however, others are asking whether fast fashion can be sustainable at all. Perhaps what really concerns the fashion chains is something else.
Protecting sales and growth by creating a green facade.
Sabur the ferryman navigates through a labyrinth of water hyacinths, his mouth full of beetroot and tobacco. A dead minnow, washed in during the recent cyclone, floats by.
We are in a special export zone, exempt from taxes. Here are the fine factories at the top of the textile pyramid, a long way from the small washeries, village workshops and sprayed cotton fields. This is where the clothes were made for Adidas in the last World Cup.
And yet it’s like coming to ground zero of environmental destruction. A place so poisoned that the coconut palms along the beaches no longer grow nuts.
Shahid Mallick brought us here.
He grew up along the river and has since seen it destroyed. Now he divides his time between his job as a climate researcher at the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio and his field work here.
With his lush hair and energetic countenance, he looks younger than his 53 years. Shahid is trying to mobilise the people along the rivers against the factories.
“People think they have no chance against the rich and powerful. I want to wake them up.”
The sky is pale. The midday heat is oppressive, thirty-two degrees. The climate crisis is driving up temperatures, even in the tropics.
Shahid says global warming makes it vital to protect the freshwater we have on earth, because water shortages will soon become acute.
“Hundreds of new factories can be created. But you can’t create a new river.”
According to the website, H&M has 35 employees working on sustainability in Bangladesh. None of the many local residents we interviewed had ever seen any inspectors.
Shahid Mallick urges the foreign chains to involve local residents and get them to speak up.
“This would give a true picture of emissions. If that’s what you want.”
The think tank Planet Tracker warned earlier this year that fashion companies are basing their sustainability promises on “zombie data” – information that is false, unreliable or impossible to verify.
Like water from hidden underground canals.
Sterling Denim, the workplace of more than four thousand textile workers, rises like a colossus above the surrounding shantytown, three miles northwest of Dhaka.
Behind the camera-monitored walls, at least a dozen garments are made for H&M, including skinny jeans in children’s styles, priced at around €22.50.
The pattern is repeated. Once again, residents point out how the outflow pipe is hidden under a dirt road. The blue-black water all spills into a wetland.
This will be the eleventh and last H&M factory we visit in Bangladesh. And the fourth that we can link to pollution. Together, the four factories produce at least 39 garments that are now sold at H&M.
Their emissions may be in violation of Bangladesh’s environmental laws.
“Everyone here knows where the filth comes from”, says Sohaq Islam, 21, a textile worker himself, but at a different factory.
He points up at Sterling’s building, the only one on this side of the water. He tells a story that has become familiar.
“The pollution is worst in the evening, when it’s dark. It’s impossible to be here then.”
Some kids are flying a homemade kite. The older ones kick a soccer ball.
This is a story about people and water. About the clothes we wear, and about responsibility.
The spotlight could just as easily have been shone on Kapp-Ahl, which states on its website that it helps the vulnerable in Bangladesh.
Or Lindex, which claims to “exist” to empower and inspire women from cotton fields to fitting rooms.
Or any of the other Swedish or foreign brands that, unlike H&M, have chosen not to disclose the factories in which their garments are made.
We can also shine a light on ourselves.
It is not poverty that is destroying the water in Bangladesh. It is our demand and our affluence.
We’re back in the H&M store on Drottninggatan in Stockholm. Christmas shopping is underway, employees are folding garment after garment.
Downstairs, in front of the entrance to the children’s department, one garment blazes like a Christmas tree. The red kid’s sweater with Santa print from Taqwa Fabrics: “Best price SEK 49.90 [around €4.50]”, the sign calls out.
The text on the inside is smaller and almost hidden, but is there as a reminder of the garment’s true price. “Made in Bangladesh.”
Footnote: Aftonbladet contacted H&M during the week for an interview. The fashion chain chose to respond with a written comment. In it, Shariful Hoque, responsible for water issues within the H&M group, states that the company takes the information seriously:
“We are in close contact with our business partners and have launched our own investigations to gain further clarity on these specific issues.”
Translation by Voxeurop.