Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’re closing up our live page shortly, so do take a moment to read back on what we’ve been covering.

We started today by mapping anti-government demonstrations in Iran after another night of unrest. Click here to see the latest footage we’ve verified of protests after Friday prayers in the city of Zahedan and what we know about the internet blackout reported across the country.

At lunchtime we brought you expert analysis after a reported strike by Russia using a Oreshnik ballistic missile. Read more about what they told BBC Verify and click here to see images we’ve verified of damage to a residential building in Kyiv.

And this afternoon we’ve turned to misleading claims after the fatal shooting of a woman in Minnesota by a US immigration officer. We’ve debunked this AI-generated picture claiming to show an aerial view of the incident and this is the video we’ve seen spreading online that is actually old footage.

Thanks so much for joining us today - BBC Verify Live will be back on Monday morning with more.

Jake Horton
BBC Verify

Immigration enforcement in the US has ramped up significantly since President Donald Trump returned to office, with mass deportations being one of his key campaign pledges.

BBC Verify has been tracking immigration raids across the country since last summer.

Our team in Washington DC produced this special investigation back in November, analysing more than 70 videos to identify three tactics being widely used by ICE:

• agents concealing their identities
• officers arresting people in areas that were previously protected
• and the use of weapons that would normally be used when attempting to control riots such as tear gas

What do we know about the latest oil tanker seized by US?published at 17:07 GMT 9 January

17:07 GMT 9 January

We’ve been looking into the background of the oil tanker sezied by US forces earlier today in the Caribbean.

Most recently, the Olina has been flying the flag of East Timor. According to the shipping database Equasis, this was a false flag as the vessel was not officially registered in that country. Prior to that it flew the flags of Sao Tome & Principe, Panama, the Marshall Islands and the Isle of Man.

It’s name has changed over time as well. Starting off as British Mallard in 2005, it became Magnus then Minerva M, finally emerging on official records as Olina in January 2025.

Image source, Howard Harrison / MarineTraffic

Its past movements have been difficult to track as it has only broadcast its position sporadically over the past year - and even these transmissions may not be accurate. Its last self-reported position was in early November off the coast of Venezuela. Prior to that, there is no signal from the vessel all the way back to May 2025 , when off the Chinese coast.

We don’t know where it was when US forces borded it today as its AIS positioning transmitter is currently inactive.

Anthony Reuben
BBC Verify senior journalist

Downing Street is refusing to deny reports in The Times today that military chiefs warned before Christmas of a £28bn shortfall in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) budget over the next four years.

The government is currently planning to increase spending on defence to 2.5% of the value of the economy by 2027 and has also signed up to the Nato target to spend 3.5% by 2035.

I asked Bee Boileau from the Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank about the £28bn figure and she pointed out that we don’t yet have published plans for defence spending over the next four years, so it’s hard to assess whether there will be a shortfall.

She also urged caution because it’s not unusual to see such warnings ahead of a major review. In this case, it’s the Defence Investment Plan, which sets out how the government will deliver the programmes in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR). It was supposed to have been published in the autumn but is now reported to have been pushed back to March.

But she added that the SDR was “very ambitious” so that “it’s entirely plausible that meeting these ambitions is proving challenging within available funding”.

An MoD spokesperson did not engage with the question of the shortfall, but said: “We are working flat out on the Defence Investment Plan, which will fix the outdated, overcommitted, and underfunded defence programme we inherited.”

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify senior journalist

One of President Trump’s campaign pledges was to end illegal crossings at the US southern border, which reached record levels under President Biden.

In his interview on Fox, Trump told Hannity that “nobody comes, nobody even tries [to cross the border]”.Crossings have fallen dramatically under Trump, but there are still migrants trying to enter the US from Mexico over this border.

The latest figures show 7,350 arrests by Border Patrol at the US southern border in November,, external down 84% from the same month the year before under Biden.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify senior journalist

President Donald Trump sat down with Fox News’ Sean Hannity last night to discuss his first year in office since his re-election.

The interview covered Trump’s actions against Venezuela from strikes on alleged drug boats to the seizure of President Nicolas Maduro.

Trump claimed drug cartels in the region “are killing 250-300,000 people in our country every single year”.

This figure is much higher than the official count of US drug deaths published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC provisionally reported 73,690 overall drug overdose deaths, external in the year to April 2025.

Image source, Fox

When asked about Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump repeated his claim that he has “stopped eight wars”.

However, a number of the conflicts he is referring to lasted just days, even where they had been the result of long standing tensions.

And one of the “wars” he said he had ended - between Egypt and Ethiopia - was actually diplomatic tensions over the building of a dam, rather than fighting.

You can read BBC Verify’s assessment of that claim here.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

An AI-generated image that claims to show an aerial view of ICE agents approaching Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis on Wednesday minutes before she was shot and killed has been spread widely online.

The image is being used to make a variety of claims about the positioning of the ICE agent in front of Good’s car. Grant from Washington DC got in touch to ask us if the image is real.

We’ve tracked the picture back to an account on X that has “Trump Loyalist” and “#Ai” in its profile.

Yesterday the account posted a “simulation of the positions of the ICE agents” based on one frame from a real video of the incident, which appears to have been generated with AI.

The simulation starts with this real frame before zooming up and over the car to give an AI-generated aerial view of the incident.

Some of the details in the simulation are similar to what we’ve analysed in the real footage, but other key details don’t match - the passenger seat door wasn’t open, for example, and the figure on the right of the car was not an officer holding a gun as it appears in the simulation.

Click play below to watch BBC Verify’s second-by-second breakdown of real footage from the shooting.

Jake Horton
BBC Verify journalist

Following reports of US forces apprehending an oil tanker named Olina in the Caribbean Sea, US authorities have released footage of the incident, stating they “executed a boarding and seizure” of the vessel.

BBC Verify has compared the ship seen in the videos to previous pictures of the Olina and found that features are consistent.

In both the footage and the images you can see the bridge of the ship appears to be the same dimensions, with a three-chimney vent and a spherical structure beside it.

Jake Horton
BBC Verify journalist

Protests have continued in multiple US cities after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her car on Wednesday.

Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, was shot dead by a federal immigration agent in Minneapolis, sparking widespread outrage and leading local officials to demand ICE leave the city.

Since the incident, an old video of ICE agents stopping a woman in her car and arresting her by the side of the road has been widely shared.

The footage purports to be new and has had more than 1.5 million views across several social media posts.

We verified the footage was taken last December in Key Largo, Florida.

In the incident, officers are seen detaining a woman in medical scrubs while she shouts that she is a US citizen.

At the time, officials said she was arrested for refusing to provide identification during a traffic stop, and that she was released shortly after when agents checked her driver's license.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve reported before about increasingly seeing online creators hiding the watermarks that get added onto videos they’ve made with AI. Hiding the watermarks help to disguise that a video has been AI-generated and to make it look more real.

This video was posted after the US seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this week. It claims to a show an MP in the House of Commons asking why Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu cannot be seized and brought before a court in the same manner Maduro was and it’s been spread widely online.

In the original video, which has gathered almost six million views, the watermark for OpenAI’s Sora generator is still visible. It was posted on TikTok by an account with a bio stating: “Most of the content is AI generated”.

But in this version of the video which has circulated across social media platforms there are multiple points where you can see an AI watermark has been blurred.

Here’s a quick guide on how to spot the new ways creators are trying to disguise the watermarks on AI videos.

Christine Jeavans
BBC Verify senior journalist

Here’s an updated map of verified locations in Iran that have seen one or more protests since 28 December 2025.

We’ve added 16 more towns and cities to the map since Tuesday, with the latest being Zahedan in the east, near the border with Pakistan.

This map shows locations where the BBC has verified video footage, there may be other protests that we have not yet been able to verify.

Fridon Kiria and Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify

We’ve been looking at videos posted overnight showing a series of drone and missile strikes in the Kyiv region.

President Zelensky said this morning that the attacks had left four people dead, and that one building in the capital was reportedly hit twice in succession, leaving an emergency worker dead. , external

Daylight footage shared on social media enabled us to find the location of this building by comparing it to street view on Google Maps, working with colleagues in BBC Ukrainian to cross-reference the images with places in Kyiv. We also compared the footage to images shared by news agencies this morning to check it was recent.

Image source, Getty Images

There were some other videos from Kyiv filmed at night showing fires burning in high-rise buildings. We confirmed the locations by checking with a local source and comparing the footage to Google and other mapping services. We also checked that these videos were recent.

We are looking for more footage of attacks in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine.

Ghoncheh Habibiazad and Yi Ma
BBC Persian and BBC Verify

Videos verified by BBC Persian and BBC Verify show a group of protesters gathering earlier today in the city of Zahedan, in Iran’s south-eastern Sistan-Baluchestan province.

Protests have previously been seen after Friday prayers in Zahedan but demonstrations have been ramping up in recent weeks. In one of the videos from today, people can be heard chanting “death to the dictator”, referencing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The Halvash news website, which focuses on human rights issues in Sistan-Baluchestan, said security forces fired tear gas and so-called “pellet bullets” during the action. Internet access is still restricted in Iran, which means fewer videos are emerging today from the country.

Zahedan has repeatedly been the scene of unrest in recent years.

On 30 September 2022, a day that later became known as “Bloody Friday”, at least 60 people were killed and dozens injured during widespread protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, according to human rights groups. They said security forces opened fire on demonstrators from inside a police station in the city.

US forces have seized an oil tanker named Olina off the coast of Venezuela, according to the maritime risk company Vanguard Tech.

The Olina is on multiple sanctions lists, including those of the United States and UK.

Its location at the time of the seizure has not been reported but Vanguard says the vessel was attempting to break through the US naval blockade in the Caribbean Sea.

BBC Verify has been tracking the recent movement of US-sanctioned vessels in the area, however the Olina has not reported it position since 1 November, when it declared its location as off the Venezuelan coast, east of the island of Curaçao.

BBC Verify will continue to monitor the situation.

Thomas Spencer
BBC Verify researcher

BBC Verify has been looking into Russian claims that it launched an Oreshnik ballistic missile strike against Ukraine overnight.

We have been unable to geolate the footage because of lack of distinctive details and darkness, but we have been able to confirm that the footage is new.

We showed the CCTV footage that purports to show the missile hitting Ukraine’s Lviv region to numerous experts.

Image source, Telegram

They agreed the video was “visually consistent” with what would be expected from the reported characteristics of the Oreshnik, an upgraded intermediate range ballistic missile thought to be capable of simultaneously launching multiple warheads.

Fabian Hinz, Research Fellow for Missile Technologies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies identified the missile from the “distinctive pattern of submunitions seen glowing as they descend at high speeds”.

However, some of the experts we spoke to disagree on whether the missile was armed with multiple warheads.

Alistair Saddington, Professor of Defence Aeronautics at the University of Cranfield added there were no immediate signs of explosions.

It is only the second time that Moscow has used the Oreshnik, which was first deployed to hit the central city of Dnipro in November 2024. This weapon that is thought to pose a serious challenge to Ukraine's air defences and is claimed to be capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Christine Jeavans
BBC Verify senior journalist

We’re updating our map of protests in Iran today following the latest spread of protests overnight.

The BBC is not allowed to report from inside the country but BBC Verify and BBC Persian have been analysing and checking hundreds of videos both from social media and those which have been sent directly to us.

Part of the verification process is geo-location - finding the exact spot where an event was filmed - which means we gather latitude and longitude co-ordinates for each video.

For mapping, we then group video locations that are in the same town or city so that we have one set of co-ordinates for each spot.

Finally, we plot these points on a map of Iran to see the spread of areas with verified protests. To do this, we use a programming language called R.

There may be protests which are not yet mapped as we do not have verified video from them.

Ghoncheh Habibiazad
Senior reporter, BBC Persian

A nationwide internet blackout has been reported across Iran since last night.

The internet monitoring organisation NetBlocks reported at 04:30 GMT this morning that “Iran has now been offline for 12 hours, with national connectivity flatlining at around 1% of ordinary levels”.

Many Iranians who no longer live in the country have said on X they are struggling to get in contact with family members in Iran. Some said their families’ landlines also appear to have been cut off.

Image source, Netblocks

Iranian authorities have repeatedly imposed internet restrictions during periods of unrest, citing security concerns and alleged cyber-attacks. The most recent internet outage was during the 12-day war with Israel in the summer when officials cited the same reasons.

More than 100 protesters were believed to have been killed during a blackout in 2019, according to human rights organisations. Those protests had been sparked by a fuel price hike but details of the demonstrations only emerged fully after internet access was restored.

Joshua Cheetham and Ghoncheh Habibiazad
BBC Verify and BBC Persian

BBC Verify and BBC Persian are analysing footage of protests from several parts of Iran, including in Tehran, the holy city of Mashhad, the southern island of Kish and north-western Ardabil province.

One site we’ve been investigating includes a fire in the offices of state broadcaster IRIB in the city of Isfahan. A video shared on social media shows several buildings on fire along a stretch of road.

We matched features in this video with satellite imagery on Google Earth, and have located it to the office of the Young Journalists Club – a subsidiary of IRIB.

It’s unclear what caused the fire and if anyone has been injured.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

Today we’re tracking the spread of anti-government protests across Tehran and other cities in Iran during the internet blackout. We’ve been working with our with our colleagues at BBC Persian to verify videos and images of both peaceful demonstrations and violent clashes with Iran’s security forces. More than 30 protesters and eight security personnel have now been killed, according to US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA), and around 2,270 protesters arrested.

We’re also looking at the missile strike Russia made overnight on Kyiv. Russia's defence ministry say it’s a response to a drone attack on Vladimir Putin's residence in December, which Kyiv denies carrying out. We’re speaking to weapons experts to find out more about the Oreshnik missile which Moscow is reported to have used and which has only been deployed once before in this war.

And after the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by an ICE agent two days ago, we’re looking into a shooting incident involving a Border Patrol agent in Portland, Oregon, that left two people wounded yesterday.