29/12/2018 GMT

For this month's Witness, Razia Iqbal presents five of the most compelling Witness stories of the year. We meet a great niece of the Tsar talking about the Russian revolution, a former US navy cameraman on the day a US Navy warship shot down an Iranian airliner, the story of an Australian town wiped out by asbestos, the doctor who saved Bulgaria's dancing bears and China's first barefoot doctors.