Ahmed Ashour is an award-winning Investigative Journalist and Editor. He has conducted and contributed to cross-border investigations that have won and/or been shortlisted for several awards, in collaboration with ARIJ, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Deutsche Welle (DW), and the Center for International Asset Recovery (CIFAR), in cooperation with the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). He also contributed to major projects including the FinCEN Files (2020), the Pandora Papers (2021), the Cyprus Confidential (2023), and the Damascus Files (2025), led by the ICIJ.
His investigations have exposed the smuggling of Yemeni antiquities to Europe and Gulf countries during the war, the trafficking of Captagon from Syria to Libya, the illegal trade in rare falcons between Libya and Gulf states, illicit foreign assets owned by influential figures in the former Egyptian and Sudanese regimes, and the use of advanced weapons—developed with European research support—in Israeli attacks on civilians in Gaza.
He has supervised investigations at ARIJ that were nominated for and won several international and regional awards. He also contributed to developing the methodology for investigating disinformation campaigns in 2025, and to the guide “Climate Justice – An Investigative Lens” (2024), a collaboration between ARIJ and Internews. Additionally, he contributed to the study “The State of Disinformation and Fact-Checking in the Global South,” in partnership between ARIJ and the South African universities of Cape Town and Stellenbosch. He also managed the Edit and Verify project launched by the Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN) from ARIJ in 2022, and the “Open Climate Journalism Initiative” in collaboration between ARIJ and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in 2023.
He has trained thousands of journalists across the Arab world with ARIJ and the Arab Fact-Checkers Network on investigative journalism, open-source intelligence (OSINT), climate journalism, and fact-checking. He has also delivered training through programs organized by several international institutions, including the Reuters Institute, taz (Die Tageszeitung), Amwaj Media, and Internews.
Since 2023, he has been teaching “Open-Source Intelligence and Digital Data Analysis” at the Faculty of Mass Communication, Cairo University. He has also served as a lecturer and thesis evaluator for graduation projects at several universities, including the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the Canadian University in Cairo.
He holds a Master’s degree in International Media Studies from the University of Bonn, Germany, and a “International Journalist” certificate from the Deutsche Welle Academy.