Nawal Al-Maghafi

Award-winning investigations - revealing secrets, rooting out injustice, and exposing crime, corruption, and abuse. The biggest stories from BBC correspondents all over the world.

In 1971, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE ceased to be part of Britain’s empire in the Middle East and became fully independent states. BBC News Persia and BBC Arabic collaborate in this gripping film, to uncover the secrets and shady deals that underpinned the decolonization process. From eye-witness accounts of a British-organised coup to Iran being left in control of disputed islands, it's a fascinating insight to a murky history.

BBC Arabic's Nawal Al-Maghafi reveals how the UAE hired mercenaries to conduct targeted assassinations of its political enemies in Yemen, with American mercenaries starting the killings in 2015.

In this undercover investigation, Nawal al-Maghafi exposes a secret world of sexual exploitation in Iraq. Some Shia clerics are using a controversial practice called ‘pleasure marriage’ to groom vulnerable girls and young women and pimp them out.

In 2008, 23-year-old Norwegian student Martine Vik Magnussen was killed after a night out in Mayfair. Hours after her death, the only suspect in the case, Farouk Abdulhak, the son of one of Yemen’s richest and most powerful men, fled the UK to Yemen.

Following six years of war between the Houthis, a rebel group backed by Iran, and a Saudi-led coalition, an estimated 2 million children in Yemen are suffering from starvation, and 3.5 million people have been internally displaced. In “Yemen’s COVID Cover-Up,” the Yemen-born al-Maghafi returns to her home country to investigate how COVID-19 has impacted these compounding crises. She finds evidence of a far higher death toll than Houthi authorities in the country’s north are admitting, and reveals that the Houthi suspension of doctors' salaries, international aid cuts and the Saudi blockade have had a dire impact on Yemeni doctors’ ability to treat COVID patients. “Lack of oxygen caused most of the deaths,” one doctor tells her. As President Biden commits to ending U.S. support for Saudi offensives in Yemen, this documentary is a powerful look at the situation on the ground.