Mohammed Bassiki

Mohammed Bassiki was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Scrap Wars: How child labour and conflict feed Turkey steel boom.

An investigative journalist, founder and Executive Director of the Syrian Investigative Reporting for Accountability Journalism – SIRAJ, the first investigative journalism unit in Syria. It aims to promote a culture of in-depth reporting and investigations in newsrooms, as well as provide training and capacity-building for Syrian journalists.

Bassiki has been a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington, D.C., United States, since May 2023. He also serves as a board member of the INC Communications Committee at ICIJ, and holds a diploma from the Swedish Institute / Leaders Lab (2023).

His stories focus on public spending, financial investigations, tracking money, budgets, and public and private companies, as well as human rights violations and migration.

Through SIRAJ, he collaborates with numerous international media organizations, including OCCRP, El País, Lighthouse Reports, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Finance Uncovered, Al Jazeera English, and others.

Bassiki’s investigations have been nominated for several international awards, including the “Shining Light Award” by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) in 2025, the “True Story Award” in Bern, Switzerland (2024), the ARIJ Award (2024) in the Middle East, the “Hostwriter Prize” in Germany (2023), and the “Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism” (2022), in addition to several awards from the International Center for Journalists.

Andrés Mourenza

Andrés Mourenza  was selected for the 2026 Shortlist with Scrap Wars: How child labour and conflict feed Turkey steel boom.

Andrés Mourenza (A Coruña, 1984) is a Spanish journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey, since 2005. He currently works for the Spanish daily EL PAÍS and other Spanish media outlets. Throughout his career, Mourenza has reported from Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq and the Caucasus, covering a wide range of topics, from armed conflicts and political crises to economic policy and migration.

His investigative reporting has been shortlisted for the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize (“The Bankers of Irregular Migration”), the Premio Gabriel García Márquez, and the Global Shining Light Award (“Turkey’s EU-Funded Deportation Machine”). He received an honorable mention in the Trace Prize for Investigative Reporting (“The Bankers…”) and was part of the EL PAÍS team that won the Investigative Journalism for Europe Impact Award in 2023 (“Xinjiang Police Files”).

In 2020, Mourenza published the book Sínora, which examines the history of the Greek–Turkish border, one of the main gateways for migrants and asylum seekers attempting to enter the European Union. A year earlier, together with his colleague Ilya U. Topper, he published La democracia es un tranvía, about President Erdoğan’s rise to power and the evolution of Turkey in recent decades.