At some point in our lives most of us have done something to upset someone.
That person might have responded by politely asking you not to do it again, or they may have decided life is too short and simply let it go.
If you’re lucky they won’t have responded by paying a hitman thousands of pounds to have you killed.
Alexis was 19 when she received a call from the police in her hometown in the United States in 2018.
The officer told her to come to the station immediately for a conversation that would change her life forever.
“They asked if I had p****d anyone off and I said ‘no, I don’t think so’… then they said someone had paid a couple of grand to put a hit out on me.”
Alexis, whose surname we are not reporting to protect her identity, was understandably left wondering why somebody would want to have her killed, and on top of that – who did she know that had access to a hitman?
However, it turns out whoever it was didn’t need to go to the effort of making contacts in the mafia or violent street gangs.
Trying to find a hitman was apparently much easier than that.
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This person had simply fired up their laptop and accessed a dangerous online space where criminals can remain anonymous as they operate outside of the law.
It is known as the “dark web”.
The hidden underbelly of the internet allows people to buy and sell drugs and weapons, watch illegal pornography, and even hire hackers to target individuals or businesses.
There is also a disturbing amount of apparent “murder-for-hire” sites offering hitman services in exchange for cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin.
Image: One site claims to have ‘thousands of satisfied customers’
An anonymous dark web user had logged on to a site called Camorra Hitman and made a Bitcoin transaction worth $5,770 (around £4,800) to have Alexis kidnapped and murdered.
Camorra Hitman is no longer running but dozen of sites claiming to offer the same services are still operating on the dark web.
‘Contract murder from $15,000’
Sky News contacted several of these websites to see if they would put someone forward for interview to discuss their operations.
None of the websites responded.
Image: The order form from one of the sites – which asks customers for the name and address of the ‘target’
A couple of the sites feature images of people who appear to have been killed in knife attacks or road accidents. It’s not clear if the photographs are real or genuinely linked to the services the websites claim to offer.
One site, which we have chosen not to name, claims to offer “contract murder” from $15,000 (£12,600) and “beatings” from $2,000 (£1,600).
Dark web users provide personal details of people they want killed
Chris Monteiro is a UK-based hacker and dark web vigilante who gains access to transactions between buyers and sellers on these sites.
He then passes the information on to law enforcement agencies in the UK and abroad.
In fact, it was Mr Monteiro who tipped off police in the United States about the hit on Alexis.
“Over several years I have encountered thousands of legitimate murder plots,” he said.
“People are going to these sites and providing details of the person they want killed, such as where they work, where they live and how much they’re willing to pay.”
Image: Chris Monteiro, pictured, says he has uncovered thousands of legitimate murder plots on the dark web
‘I had a knife on me’
However, over the years Mr Monteiro discovered the websites he had been hacking into were not what they seemed to be.
The ones he had accessed were not real – and all investigations into “murder-for-hire” websites in these spaces have found them to be fake.
And thankfully for Alexis, this includes the one used by her would-be perpetrator.
But whether the site was real or not, there was still someone out there who had used it with the intention of ending her life.
“I was a little scared at first… I had pepper spray on me. I had a knife on me. I had a plank of wood in my car in case someone attacked me. So life was very different.”
Image: One of the sites claims to offer ‘services for hiring killers around the world’
Law enforcement officials ‘not doing enough’
The police passed the investigation on to the FBI who closed her case in 2019 and told her the “United States Attorney’s Office has declined to prosecute”.
Whoever did try and have Alexis killed is still living freely today.
Both Alexis and Mr Monteiro accuse law enforcement of doing little to resolve the problem around these sites.
When asked what they are doing to tackle the issue, the UK’s National Crime Agency told the Sky News Daily podcast in a statement: “The NCA and its partners around the world work closely to remove criminal sites, and frequently identify and bring to account individuals committing serious and organised crime on the dark web – ranging from sharing indecent images of children to supplying class A drugs.”
Regardless of the legitimacy of the “murder-for-hire” websites, it doesn’t mean dangerous people aren’t paying money to them with the intention of having people killed.
When it comes to her own murder-for-hire story, Alexis says she is now getting on with her life.
“I’m trying to really grow as a person… at this point, it’s better to just move on, not to dwell on it and drag myself down.”
Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
Image: Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.
Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.
Image: Pic: Planet Labs PBC
The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.
When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.
The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.
The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.
Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.
Image: The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle
Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’
In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.
In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.
“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.
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Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.
He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.
“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Image: Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.
“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”
In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.
Image: Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March
Bodies found in ‘mass grave’
The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.
He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.
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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.
According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
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