Tag: BIRN HUB

Adelina began her career as an intern at KALLXO.com at the end of 2015 and was promoted to journalist within months. Her primary fields of experience relate to security issues and law enforcement, and her articles often arouse regional interest.

Let’s meet her!

1. You were a basketball player. If it weren’t for your injury, would you still be a sportsperson, or something else?

Although not as active as before, I am still a sportsperson. Now I prefer other forms, like walking, running, or fitness, a little easier sport that does not cause me injury problems. Now I’ve become a journalist, I tend to believe that everything happens for a reason.

2. How did you decide to become a journalist?

It’s a cliché, and we hear it many times – “I dreamed of this profession as a child,” – but it is true. Watching news shows on TV and reading good pieces in newspapers, I always imagined having my name on the bylines and doing the same. I always wanted to do something to help other people, to be the voice of my community, to investigate any case that we can learn something about, to go and report from a place where people don’t have access, to tell them only the truth and what’s really happening there, to be everywhere for them – because journalism is not easy, we need to work hard to get attention and then have their trust. When people trust us, we can get so much information about what’s happening in institutions and cases.

3. You have worked at KALLXO.com since 2015. Regarding journalism, your primary fields of experience are related to security issues and law enforcement. What did you find most challenging in your work so far?

When I start thinking about this, I see one fact: I always watched movies and documentaries about police, lawyers and crime cases, and when one of my editors called me and asked if I wanted to be a journalist who follows security issues, I didn’t hesitate to say: “Yes, of course, I love this.” But, as a 19-year-old at that time, hesitations came as I started overthinking about whether I would be able to create enough sources for my work to follow what was happening in security institutions. Now, eight years later, I feel proud, and I’m happy about everything I did in the past years investigating so many cases that ended with arrests, indictments or dismissals of various officials due to corruption cases. It was hard at the beginning because when I started to go into police stations or crime scenes, people often watched me strangely. It was not common then for women journalists to report from difficult areas or cases. The situation has changed a lot since then, and I see more and more young women working as journalists, taking on serious cases to report on.

4. Last year was very rewarding for your work since you received the award in the field of child protection from the Coalition of NGOs for Child Protection in Kosovo. Can you tell us a bit more about your awarded story, “Sex Crime File: How the Accused of Sexual Assault on a Student Was Released”?

I started working on this case in 2022 when someone wanted to meet me to discuss his 14-year-old daughter, who’d been the victim of a sexual assault in her school. He first told me: “I don’t believe the system, the police, the prosecutor, and I came here to tell you what’s happening with the case.” I thought this was a reward for me; people who’d lost trust in institutions that are supposed to protect them come to me to address their problems with a system which is not working. These are the moments that grow you as a journalist.

It was continuous work on the story. In the end, it resulted in an investigation that made the prosecution extend the investigations and indict a second suspect, who was previously somehow “forgotten” and considered just as a witness.

5. During your career, you received many awards for investigative journalism. What do they mean to you?

First of all, pride. Taking awards is not what I think of when I work on any investigation. It is just an evaluation of my work by others who assess it. My first and foremost goal is to try to give a voice to those who are unheard. The impact of the reports is the biggest prize for me. The awards given to me over the years since I started my career are just another impetus for the work we do.

The International Press Institute, IPI – a global network of editors, media executives and journalists, with a mission to defend media freedom and the free flow of news – and the Media Freedom Rapid Response, MFRR – a Europe-wide mechanism that tracks violations of press freedom in EU Member States and candidate countries – on January 10 condemned the cyber-attack and false copyright claims that BIRN received in December 2023.

“International Press Institute, IPI condemns the recent DDoS cyber-attack and two allegedly fraudulent copyright claims filed against BIRN which comes after it refused to delete public interest reports on convicted Turkish fraudster Yasam Ayavefe,” stated IPI.

MFRR included the attacks against BIRN on its Mapping Media Freedom map.

The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network’s website, Balkan Insight, on December 22 received a major distributed denial-of-service DDoS attack after it published news about false copyright claims made over two of its articles concerning convicted Turkish fraudster Yasam Ayavefe.

A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the regular functioning of a targeted server by overwhelming it with a flood of internet traffic.

BIRN on December 19 had published a news article, “BIRN Texts on Turkish Fraudster Falsely Reported over Copyright,”  about two false copyright infringement complaints it had received concerning two of its articles.

The first article, published February 15, had been about a cyber-attack on the Greek media outlet Documento, after it reported that Ayavefe’s wife had secured fake ID papers from an organised crime gang.

The second article, published July 26, had been about the request of an Ayavefe representative for BIRN to remove its reports about his client.

“These kinds of posts affect the business life of my client [Ayavefe]. He has invested in so many countries and posts like this cause my client material and moral damage,” Bener Ljutviovski, who introduced himself as Ayavefe’s representative, told BIRN in an email.

BIRN received the copyright infringement complaints via a hosting company that leases out servers, submitted by two people under the name of Rocky Paul, purportedly based in Colorado, US, and from an individual named Sharon Henkel, purportedly based in France.

The complaints claimed that a blogspot page titled Global News Express and a Tumblr account called “mindbluray” had originally published the BIRN articles.

However, the alleged authors had merely republished the BIRN articles, changing the dates from February 26 to February 1 and from July 26 to July 21.

It is not the first time cyber-attacks have buffeted BIRN; in September 2022, BIRN and its Greek partner media outlet Solomon’s websites came under a DDoS attack after publishing an investigation on how Ayavefe – despite being convicted by a Turkish court in 2017 of defrauding online gamblers and arrested in Greece in 2019 trying to cross the border into Bulgaria on a false passport – got honorary Greek citizenship.

The investigative outlet Inside Story first wrote about Ayavefe’s Greek citizenship – and came under a DDoS attack after publishing its report on him.

In the meantime, Ayavefe managed to get 201 online content items in Turkey removed under three court orders. The removed content included news articles, social media posts and even the official website content and social media posts of the Turkish Police.

Ayavefe’s representative in July, besides asking for the removal of the articles, offered BIRN financial incentives in return for compliance. “My client Dr Yasam Ayavefe has an advertising company, if you help us in this case we can provide advertising services to your organisation, so you can grow to a bigger organisation. We would love to cooperate with you,” he wrote.

BIRN rejected Ljutviovski’s offer and his repeated demands to remove the articles about Ayavefe.