More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.

The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

The case is shedding light on the human cost of the boom in social media use in recent years that has required more and more moderation, often in some of the poorest parts of the world, to protect users from the worst material that some people post.

At least 40 of the moderators in the case were misusing alcohol, drugs including cannabis, cocaine and amphetamines, and medication such as sleeping pills. Some reported marriage breakdown and the collapse of desire for sexual intimacy, and losing connection with their families. Some whose job was to remove videos uploaded by terrorist and rebel groups were afraid they were being watched and targeted, and that if they returned home they would be hunted and killed.

Facebook and other large social media and artificial intelligence companies rely on armies of content moderators to remove posts that breach their community standards and to train AI systems to do the same.

The moderators from Kenya and other African countries were tasked from 2019 to 2023 with checking posts emanating from Africa and in their own languages but were paid eight times less than their counterparts in the US, according to the claim documents.

Medical reports filed with the employment and labour relations court in Nairobi and seen by the Guardian paint a horrific picture of working life inside the Meta-contracted facility, where workers were fed a constant stream of images to check in a cold warehouse-like space, under bright lights and with their working activity monitored to the minute.

Almost 190 moderators are bringing the multi-pronged claim that includes allegations of intentional infliction of mental harm, unfair employment practices, human trafficking and modern slavery and unlawful redundancy. All 144 examined by Kanyanya were found to have PTSD, GAD and MDD with severe or extremely severe PTSD symptoms in 81% of cases, mostly at least a year after they had left.

Meta and Samasource declined to comment on the claims because of the litigation.

Martha Dark, the founder and co-executive director of Foxglove, a UK-based non-profit organisation that has backed the court case, said: “The evidence is indisputable: moderating Facebook is dangerous work that inflicts lifelong PTSD on almost everyone who moderates it.

“In Kenya, it traumatised 100% of hundreds of former moderators tested for PTSD … In any other industry, if we discovered 100% of safety workers were being diagnosed with an illness caused by their work, the people responsible would be forced to resign and face the legal consequences for mass violations of people’s rights. That is why Foxglove is supporting these brave workers to seek justice from the courts.”

According to the filings in the Nairobi case, Kanyanya concluded that the primary cause of the mental health conditions among the 144 people was their work as Facebook content moderators as they “encountered extremely graphic content on a daily basis, which included videos of gruesome murders, self-harm, suicides, attempted suicides, sexual violence, explicit sexual content, child physical and sexual abuse, horrific violent actions just to name a few”.

Four of the moderators suffered trypophobia, an aversion to or fear of repetitive patterns of small holes or bumps that can cause intense anxiety. For some, the condition developed from seeing holes on decomposing bodies while working on Facebook content.

Moderation and the related task of tagging content are often hidden parts of the tech boom. Similar, but less traumatising, arrangements are made for outsourced workers to tag masses of images of mundane things such as street furniture, living rooms and road scenes so AI systems designed in California know what they are looking at.

Meta said it took the support of content reviewers seriously. Contracts with third-party moderators of content on Facebook and Instagram detailed expectations about counselling, training and round-the-clock onsite support and access to private healthcare. Meta said pay was above industry standards in the markets where they operated and it used techniques such as blurring, muting sounds and rendering in monochrome to limit exposure to graphic material for people who reviewed content on the two platforms.

Smashing bricks against the side of your house is not a normal way to wind down after work. Nor is biting your own arm or being scared to go to sleep. But that was the reality for one of the 144 people diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder after moderating horrific content for Facebook.

The young mother in her 20s did the job in Nairobi for more than two years during which she claims she had to vet unspeakably graphic videos. These included extreme sexual deviancy and bestiality, child abuse, torture, dismemberment and murder, which caused her to vomit, according to court filings. On one occasion she recalled having to watch a person having sex with a snake.

The woman was one of hundreds of young Africans, many from Kenya, who worked from 2019 to 2023 at an outsourcing company, Samasource, used by Facebook’s owner Meta to protect its hundreds of millions of users from the worst of the torrent of images and video being uploaded to the social media platform every minute.

According to a compensation claim filed in Kenyan courts by 185 of the moderators, they toiled through day and night shifts in a facility with glaring bright lights, chilly air conditioning, and uncomfortable seats and screens at full brightness. There was close monitoring of performance levels that could lead to contract termination if they dipped. They typically had a minute to evaluate each piece of content – but it would be seared into their minds’ eye for much longer.

From the outside, the Samasource offices look like a regular corporate workplace. In the front of the building, which sits in a bustling business park by a busy road, there is a fountain and a poster that reads “the soul of AI”. It would be a rare passerby who would suspect the darkness that coursed through the screens within.

A woman in her 30s told expert witness psychiatrists that she worked on one video that showed a man being dismembered limb from limb until he died. She cried and walked out of her workstation to compose herself, but the team leader followed her and asked her to get back to work. Other content she had to handle included videos of summary executions during Ethiopia’s civil war. She developed migraines, flashbacks and nightmares. While she used to be “pleasant and happy”, now “she is sad and cries most of the time even without a trigger, she is easily upset and tends to argue with her husband all the time”, a psychiatric assessment said.

And then there was the moderator who was diagnosed with trypophobia, the fear of seeing a pattern of holes such as in a honeycomb, possibly as a result of repeatedly seeing video of maggots crawling out of holes in a decomposing human hand during her three years moderating Facebook content. These images would pop up frequently and cause her to hyperventilate, scream and cry.

Moderators said their managers were “positioned all over the floor”, monitoring aspects of their work such as speed and accuracy on tasks, and time spent on breaks.

Meta has declined to comment on the specific claims while litigation is ongoing but said it required outsourcing firms to offer counselling and healthcare, pay above local industry standards and said it provided technical solutions to limit exposure to graphic materials such as blurring and an opt-out of the autoplay function whereby videos or pictures are played in a nonstop stream. Samasource declined to comment.

The moderators’ diagnoses of PTSD, depression and generalised anxiety disorder caused by their work as Facebook moderators are all part of the hidden human cost of policing the internet.

It is common to assume that AI now takes care of content moderation, but that is not yet the case. Some moderators are still tasked with vetting a torrent of vile material flagged as a concern on social media platforms while others are training the AI that may one day take over.

Despite AI advances, Facebook has a 40,000-strong army of content moderators. Labelling images and text as disturbing or traumatic is one of the costs of delivering generative AI to consumers as the systems need to be taught how to moderate. It is one of the reasons, alongside the need for huge amounts of water to cool datacentres andthe power demands to run them, that AI is described by some observers as an “extractive industry”.

In the case of Facebook, the potential risks to moderators were to some extent known before the 185 workers in Kenya bringing their legal action were tasked with vetting grisly content. In September 2018, a US-based moderator, Selina Scola, and others sued Facebook and in 2020 won a $52m (£41m) payout in compensation for her and the more than 10,000 former and current content moderators across the US for their exposure to graphic content. In 2019, Chris Gray, a former Facebook content moderator in Dublin, began a similar legal action against the platform and the outsourcing company he worked through. His case is yet to reach trial.

But the Kenyan workers were in harness during the pandemic, working alone in hotel rooms away from family, and back in the facility up to 2023.

Meta and Samasource provided wellness counsellors, but they were not medical doctors or able to provide psychiatric support or trained to deal with people facing mental health crises, the claim alleges. Requests for psychiatric care under employee medical insurance were “ignored”, yet Meta and Sama “were aware of the mental health harm and the symptoms the petitioners were grappling with”, the claim asserts.

As many of the moderators were young, the sexual violence against children and adults they had to review was sometimes their first exposure to sexual content. Some became desensitised to sexual urges and were repulsed by their own sexual partners; others became addicted to sex and pornography.

Meanwhile, Ethiopians tasked with handling content from the war in their home country were targeted by one of the warring parties, and were threatened that if they continued deleting posts from that group they would be harmed. One moderator had to spend months in a safe house. Religious moderators felt shame at having to watch sexual content.

After one moderator, Daniel Motaung, launched a legal action, other workers were told associating with him would lead to dismissals, surveillance increased and dismissals increased. Then, in January, there were mass redundancies, although this was paused by the courts in Kenya. The moderators bringing the current legal action believe the mass redundancies were retaliation for Motaung’s case.

The grounds for the case against Meta and Samasource include Kenyan laws against forced labour, human trafficking and modern slavery, unfair labour practices, intentional infliction of mental health harm, curtailing the right to access justice, employment discrimination and unlawful redundancy.

When James Irungu took on a new job for the tech outsourcing company Samasource, his manager provided scant details before his training began. But the role was highly sought after and would nearly double his pay to £250 a month. Plus it offered a path out of Kibera, the vast shantytown on the outskirts of Nairobi where he lived with his young family.

“I thought I was one of the lucky ones,” the 26-year-old, said. But then he found himself ploughing through heaps of violent and sexually explicit material, including grisly accidents, suicides, beheadings and child abuse.

“I remember one day when I logged in to see a child with their stomach torn wide open, suffering but not dead,” the Kenyan national told the Guardian. It was seeing child exploitation material “when it really kicked in that this was something different”.

He had been hired by Samasource to moderate Facebook content, weeding out the most toxic posts. Some of the most tormenting images remained etched in his mind, occasionally jolting him awake in night sweats. Fearing that opening up about his work would evoke discomfort, concern or judgment from others, he kept it to himself.

Exasperated by his “secretiveness”, his wife grew distant. Irungu resigned himself to them drifting apart, convinced he was protecting her and stayed in the job for three years. He says he regrets pressing on.

“I don’t think that work is suitable for human beings,” he said. “It really isolated me from the real world because I started to see it as such a dark place.” He became afraid to let his daughter out of his sight.

“When I ask myself if the money was really worth sacrificing my mental health for, the answer is no.”

Another former moderator said she was alarmed at some of the content and some fellow workers dropped out. But she found purpose in assurances from her managers that their work protected users, including young children like hers.

“I felt like I was helping people,” she said. But when she stopped, she realised that things she had normalised were troubling.

She remembered once screaming in the middle of the office floor after watching one horrific scene. Except for a few glances from co-workers, and a team leader pulling her aside to “go to wellness” counselling, it was like nothing had happened, she said. The wellness counsellors told her to take some time to rest and get the image out of her head.

“How do you forget when you’re back on the floor after a 15-minute break, to move to the next thing?” she said. She wondered if the counsellors were qualified psychotherapists, saying that they would never escalate a case for mental healthcare no matter what the moderators had seen or how distressed they were.

She went from being the kind of person who would host friends at every occasion to barely leaving her house, crying at the deaths of people she did not know to feeling numb and mentally troubled, sometimes battling suicidal thoughts.

“The work damaged me, I could never go back to it,” said the woman , who hopes that the case will have impacts on the content moderation industry in Africa, as global demand for such services grows.

“Things have to change,” she said. “I would never want anyone to go through what we did.”

Smashing bricks against the side of your house is not a normal way to wind down after work. Nor is biting your own arm or being scared to go to sleep. But that was the reality for one of the 144 people diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder after moderating horrific content for Facebook.

The young mother in her 20s did the job in Nairobi for more than two years during which she claims she had to vet unspeakably graphic videos. These included extreme sexual deviancy and bestiality, child abuse, torture, dismemberment and murder, which caused her to vomit, according to court filings. On one occasion she recalled having to watch a person having sex with a snake.

The woman was one of hundreds of young Africans, many from Kenya, who worked from 2019 to 2023 at an outsourcing company, Samasource, used by Facebook’s owner Meta to protect its hundreds of millions of users from the worst of the torrent of images and video being uploaded to the social media platform every minute.

According to a compensation claim filed in Kenyan courts by 185 of the moderators, they toiled through day and night shifts in a facility with glaring bright lights, chilly air conditioning, and uncomfortable seats and screens at full brightness. There was close monitoring of performance levels that could lead to contract termination if they dipped. They typically had a minute to evaluate each piece of content – but it would be seared into their minds’ eye for much longer.

From the outside, the Samasource offices look like a regular corporate workplace. In the front of the building, which sits in a bustling business park by a busy road, there is a fountain and a poster that reads “the soul of AI”. It would be a rare passerby who would suspect the darkness that coursed through the screens within.

A woman in her 30s told expert witness psychiatrists that she worked on one video that showed a man being dismembered limb from limb until he died. She cried and walked out of her workstation to compose herself, but the team leader followed her and asked her to get back to work. Other content she had to handle included videos of summary executions during Ethiopia’s civil war. She developed migraines, flashbacks and nightmares. While she used to be “pleasant and happy”, now “she is sad and cries most of the time even without a trigger, she is easily upset and tends to argue with her husband all the time”, a psychiatric assessment said.

And then there was the moderator who was diagnosed with trypophobia, the fear of seeing a pattern of holes such as in a honeycomb, possibly as a result of repeatedly seeing video of maggots crawling out of holes in a decomposing human hand during her three years moderating Facebook content. These images would pop up frequently and cause her to hyperventilate, scream and cry.

Moderators said their managers were “positioned all over the floor”, monitoring aspects of their work such as speed and accuracy on tasks, and time spent on breaks.

Meta has declined to comment on the specific claims while litigation is ongoing but said it required outsourcing firms to offer counselling and healthcare, pay above local industry standards and said it provided technical solutions to limit exposure to graphic materials such as blurring and an opt-out of the autoplay function whereby videos or pictures are played in a nonstop stream. Samasource declined to comment.

The moderators’ diagnoses of PTSD, depression and generalised anxiety disorder caused by their work as Facebook moderators are all part of the hidden human cost of policing the internet.

It is common to assume that AI now takes care of content moderation, but that is not yet the case. Some moderators are still tasked with vetting a torrent of vile material flagged as a concern on social media platforms while others are training the AI that may one day take over.

Despite AI advances, Facebook has a 40,000-strong army of content moderators. Labelling images and text as disturbing or traumatic is one of the costs of delivering generative AI to consumers as the systems need to be taught how to moderate. It is one of the reasons, alongside the need for huge amounts of water to cool datacentres andthe power demands to run them, that AI is described by some observers as an “extractive industry”.

In the case of Facebook, the potential risks to moderators were to some extent known before the 185 workers in Kenya bringing their legal action were tasked with vetting grisly content. In September 2018, a US-based moderator, Selina Scola, and others sued Facebook and in 2020 won a $52m (£41m) payout in compensation for her and the more than 10,000 former and current content moderators across the US for their exposure to graphic content. In 2019, Chris Gray, a former Facebook content moderator in Dublin, began a similar legal action against the platform and the outsourcing company he worked through. His case is yet to reach trial.

But the Kenyan workers were in harness during the pandemic, working alone in hotel rooms away from family, and back in the facility up to 2023.

Meta and Samasource provided wellness counsellors, but they were not medical doctors or able to provide psychiatric support or trained to deal with people facing mental health crises, the claim alleges. Requests for psychiatric care under employee medical insurance were “ignored”, yet Meta and Sama “were aware of the mental health harm and the symptoms the petitioners were grappling with”, the claim asserts.

As many of the moderators were young, the sexual violence against children and adults they had to review was sometimes their first exposure to sexual content. Some became desensitised to sexual urges and were repulsed by their own sexual partners; others became addicted to sex and pornography.

Meanwhile, Ethiopians tasked with handling content from the war in their home country were targeted by one of the warring parties, and were threatened that if they continued deleting posts from that group they would be harmed. One moderator had to spend months in a safe house. Religious moderators felt shame at having to watch sexual content.

After one moderator, Daniel Motaung, launched a legal action, other workers were told associating with him would lead to dismissals, surveillance increased and dismissals increased. Then, in January, there were mass redundancies, although this was paused by the courts in Kenya. The moderators bringing the current legal action believe the mass redundancies were retaliation for Motaung’s case.

The grounds for the case against Meta and Samasource include Kenyan laws against forced labour, human trafficking and modern slavery, unfair labour practices, intentional infliction of mental health harm, curtailing the right to access justice, employment discrimination and unlawful redundancy.

When James Irungu took on a new job for the tech outsourcing company Samasource, his manager provided scant details before his training began. But the role was highly sought after and would nearly double his pay to £250 a month. Plus it offered a path out of Kibera, the vast shantytown on the outskirts of Nairobi where he lived with his young family.

“I thought I was one of the lucky ones,” the 26-year-old, said. But then he found himself ploughing through heaps of violent and sexually explicit material, including grisly accidents, suicides, beheadings and child abuse.

“I remember one day when I logged in to see a child with their stomach torn wide open, suffering but not dead,” the Kenyan national told the Guardian. It was seeing child exploitation material “when it really kicked in that this was something different”.

He had been hired by Samasource to moderate Facebook content, weeding out the most toxic posts. Some of the most tormenting images remained etched in his mind, occasionally jolting him awake in night sweats. Fearing that opening up about his work would evoke discomfort, concern or judgment from others, he kept it to himself.

Exasperated by his “secretiveness”, his wife grew distant. Irungu resigned himself to them drifting apart, convinced he was protecting her and stayed in the job for three years. He says he regrets pressing on.

“I don’t think that work is suitable for human beings,” he said. “It really isolated me from the real world because I started to see it as such a dark place.” He became afraid to let his daughter out of his sight.

“When I ask myself if the money was really worth sacrificing my mental health for, the answer is no.”

Another former moderator said she was alarmed at some of the content and some fellow workers dropped out. But she found purpose in assurances from her managers that their work protected users, including young children like hers.

“I felt like I was helping people,” she said. But when she stopped, she realised that things she had normalised were troubling.

She remembered once screaming in the middle of the office floor after watching one horrific scene. Except for a few glances from co-workers, and a team leader pulling her aside to “go to wellness” counselling, it was like nothing had happened, she said. The wellness counsellors told her to take some time to rest and get the image out of her head.

“How do you forget when you’re back on the floor after a 15-minute break, to move to the next thing?” she said. She wondered if the counsellors were qualified psychotherapists, saying that they would never escalate a case for mental healthcare no matter what the moderators had seen or how distressed they were.

She went from being the kind of person who would host friends at every occasion to barely leaving her house, crying at the deaths of people she did not know to feeling numb and mentally troubled, sometimes battling suicidal thoughts.

“The work damaged me, I could never go back to it,” said the woman , who hopes that the case will have impacts on the content moderation industry in Africa, as global demand for such services grows.

“Things have to change,” she said. “I would never want anyone to go through what we did.”

Russia has detained an Uzbek citizen who investigators believe placed the bomb that killed Lt Gen Igor Kirillov on the instructions of Ukraine’s security service, the country’s investigative committee has said.

The 29-year-old had allegedly been recruited by Ukrainian special services and promised $100,000 and travel to the European Union, the news agency Tass reported, citing the country’s domestic spy agency, the FSB.

The man was arrested in the village of Chernoye in the Balashikha district of Moscow, the news agency Ria reported, citing interior ministry spokesperson Irina Volk.

Kirillov, the head of the military’s chemical, biological and radiological weapons unit, was killed along with his assistant when a bomb hidden in an electric scooter went off as the two men left a building in a residential area in south-east Moscow on Tuesday.

Kirillov was the most senior Russian military officer to be assassinated inside Russia. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service, which accused him of being responsible for the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops, something Moscow denies, took responsibility for the killing.

Russia’s investigative committee, which investigates serious crimes, said in a statement on Wednesday that the unnamed suspect had told them he had come to Moscow to carry out an assignment for Ukraine’s intelligence services.

In a video of the confession published by the Baza news outlet, which is known to have sources in Russian law enforcement circles, the suspect is seen sitting in a van describing his actions. It was not clear under what conditions he was speaking and Reuters could not immediately verify the video’s authenticity.

Dressed in a winter coat, the suspect is shown saying he had come to Moscow at the orders of Ukraine’s intelligence services, bought an electric scooter, and then received an improvised explosive device to carry out the attack months later.

He describes how he had placed the device on the electric scooter, which he had parked outside the entrance of the apartment block where Kirillov lived. Investigators cited him as saying that he had set up a surveillance camera in a hire car nearby and that the organisers of the assassination, who he was cited as saying had been based in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, had used the camera to watch what was going on.

The suspect, who was born in 1995, is shown saying that he had remotely detonated the device once Kirillov had left the building.

He says Ukraine had offered him $100,000 for his role in the murder and residency in a European country.

Investigators said they were identifying other people involved in the killing and the daily Kommersant newspaper reported that one other suspect had been detained.

Reuters contributed to this report

Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israeli troops will occupy a recently seized buffer zone in Syria for the foreseeable future, as intense efforts continued to reach a ceasefire deal in Gaza.

The Israeli prime minister made the remarks on Tuesday night while touring Mount Hermon – known to Syrians as Jabel Sheikh – as a report in Israel suggested the Israel Defense Forces had been ordered to hold positions there until the end of 2025.

Israeli troops occupied the positions on the mountain when they moved into a demilitarised zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights after the collapse earlier this month of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria.

Israel has faced mounting calls to move its troops from the buffer zone, most recently from the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, who called the occupation of the Golan Heights a violation of international law.

While Israeli officials have previously described the move as a limited and temporary measure to ensure the security of Israel’s borders, they have given no indication of when their troops might be withdrawn.

Netanyahu, in a statement issued by his office, said: “We are holding this assessment in order to decide on the deployment of the IDF in this important place until another arrangement is found that ensures Israel’s security.”

“It makes me nostalgic,” he added. “I was here 53 years ago with my soldiers in a patrol of the Israel Defense Forces. The place hasn’t changed, it’s the same place, but its importance to Israel’s security has only grown in recent years, and especially in recent weeks with the dramatic events that are happening here below us in Syria.”

Israel captured a significant part of Syria’s Golan Heights during the six day war in 1967, with that territory being regarded as being occupied by most countries.

The new positions seized by the IDF comprise a demilitarised buffer zone in Syria created following the 1973 Yom Kippur war.

Netanyahu has a long history of using arguments about Israel’s security to justify prolonged occupation and his resistance to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The comments follow the approval of a plan by Netanyahu to expand settlements in the part of the Golan Heights that it already controls, a move that could double the area’s population.

Israel’s moves to rapidly cement its presence in the Syria buffer zone come amid continuing efforts to reach a ceasefire-for-hostages deal with Hamas, and as the IDF issued a further order for residents of Bureij in central Gaza to leave the area in anticipation of a renewed offensive.

The CIA director, William Burns, was reported to be meeting the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, in Doha as part of the negotiations that have picked up pace again in recent days.

Amid the increased contacts, there has been mixed messaging about the proximity of any deal, with some officials talking up progress while others have pointed to potential sticking points that have hampered previous attempts to negotiate a phased ceasefire and release of hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners in Israel jails.

While Israeli officials have suggested that Hamas appears to want a deal and that gaps between the two sides have closed, there is still agreement on key issues including how many hostages – and which ones – should be released in the first phase and the identities of Palestinian prisoners being sought for release.

On Wednesday, a Palestinian official close to the negotiations said mediators had narrowed gaps on most of the agreement’s clauses but he said Israel had introduced conditions that Hamas rejected.

Hamas is also reportedly concerned that any deal agreed under the auspices of the Biden administration might not survive the swearing-in of Donald Trump on 20 January, opening the way for renewed Israeli assaults in Gaza after the first phase is completed.

Two Arab media organisations, however, suggested on Wednesday that Hamas believed most of the points of contention had been overcome.

Several rounds of talks of negotiations have failed to replicate an agreement reached in late November 2023, in which 105 hostages were released in a weeklong truce.

Israel believes that 96 of the 251 hostages kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October 2023 remain in the Gaza Strip, including the bodies of at least 34 captives.

A court has given police the green light to seize more than £2m from the self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan.

Devon and Cornwall police had been seeking to seize the money held in seven frozen bank accounts from the Tates and a woman identified only as J.

A judgment in favour of the force was handed down by the chief magistrate, Paul Goldspring, at Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday.

He said that what appeared to be a “complex financial matrix” was actually a “straightforward cheat of the revenue”.

At a hearing in July, a barrister representing the force told the court the brothers were “serial tax and VAT evaders”.

It is alleged that they had failed to pay a penny in tax on £21m of revenue from their online businesses, including War Room, Hustlers’ University, Cobra Tate and OnlyFans, between 2014 and 2022.

Sarah Clarke KC, representing the force, quoted from a video posted online by Andrew Tate in which he said: “When I lived in England I refused to pay tax.”

The court heard that he said his approach was “ignore, ignore, ignore because in the end they go away”.

It was claimed that the brothers paid just under $12m into an account in the name of J, and opened a second account in her name, even though she had no role in their businesses.

Part of the money that Devon and Cornwall police wish to seize is cryptocurrency held in an account in her name. J received a payment of £805,000 into her Revolut account, the court heard.

In his written ruling, the chief magistrate said: “I am satisfied on the balance of probabilities that they have engaged in long-standing, deliberate conduct in order to evade their tax.”

The proceedings are civil, which uses a lower standard of proof than criminal cases.

The former professional kickboxer, 37, and his brother, 36, continue to be embroiled in a legal battle with authorities in Romania. Both men were arrested in 2022 and formally indicted in mid-2023, along with two Romanian women, on charges of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.

The four have denied all the allegations against them. Last month, a Romanian court ruled that one of the public prosecutors’ cases contained numerous irregularities and ordered them to amend or withdraw it within five days.

In a statement after the ruling Tate said the chief magistrate’s ruling “is not justice” and was a “coordinated attack”.

He said: “First, they labelled me a human trafficker, yet they couldn’t find a single woman to stand against me. When that narrative crumbled, they turned to outright theft, freezing my accounts for more than two years and now seizing everything they could.

“This is not justice; it’s a coordinated attack on anyone who dares to challenge the system. Speak against the Matrix and they’ll come for your freedom, your reputation and your livelihood. This raises serious questions about the lengths authorities will go to silence dissent.”

Devon and Cornwall police said: “From the outset we have aimed to demonstrate that Andrew and Tristan Tate evaded taxes and laundered money through bank accounts located in Devon.

“The investigation focuses on substantial earnings accrued between 2014 and 2022, during which we believe no tax or VAT was paid on those funds. Furthermore, both individuals are alleged to have concealed the origins of their income by channelling money through ‘front’ accounts, constituting criminal activity and rendering those earnings proceeds of crime.”

The force added that it would refrain from further comment until a 28-day appeal period has concluded.

Tate still has more than 10 million followers on X, where he promotes an ultra-masculine lifestyle that critics say denigrates women.

A Guardian investigation has found women formerly employed as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia who appear to be “trapped” in the country after being denied birth certificates for their children or visas in order to leave and return home.

The Guardian has spoken to five Kenyan women who say they have been unable to register the birth of their children as they were born outside marriage. The women all fled abusive employers who then kept their identity documents.

The women say they have been trying to leave the country as their children are unable to attend school in Saudi Arabia without documentation, but have been told that exit visas cannot be processed because they have “stateless” children.

Having sex outside marriage is a crime under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic laws, with human rights groups saying women are disproportionately charged for this since resulting pregnancies are considered evidence. Survivors of rape or sex trafficking can be deemed to have confessed to extramarital sex and prosecuted.

Children born outside wedlock in Saudi Arabia are also not entitled to birth certificates and their undocumented status means they cannot access basic rights and services, including medical care and education, and are unable to travel outside the Kingdom.

The five women interviewed by the Guardian had pregnancies during relationships with fellow migrant workers. All of the women are now single mothers and some say they were abandoned by their child’s fathers because they were scared of being arrested for having extramarital sex.

Fatima*, a migrant from Kenya who came to Saudi Arabia to be a domestic worker, said staff at her nearest hospital in the Saudi capital Riyadh threatened to call the police when she rushed there with labour pains.

“They said they would send me to jail if I didn’t bring [the necessary] documents. I was so afraid to go to jail with labour pains. I pretended like I was strolling around the hospital. Then, I just walked out of the gate and went back to my house.”

Fatima gave birth to a son just five minutes after entering her accommodation in Riyadh. “I cut the umbilical cord and cleaned myself. I cleaned my baby and wrapped him in a blanket. It was scary, but I just had to do it. There was nobody else to help me.”

Fatima said she ran away from her employer’s home because he was sexually harassing her and being physically abusive. He also confiscated her passport. She has been working informal jobs since then, but has been trying to leave Saudi Arabia for the past two years because her son, now eight, has been unable to go to school.

“The authorities here are not too concerned about the babies and their mothers,” said Fatima, who along with a group of other migrant mothers staged a public protest in April in the Manfuhah neighbourhood in Riyadh, blocking traffic and chanting that they wanted to go home – despite protests being illegal in Saudi Arabia and punishable by imprisonment.

“We want our kids to go to school. They’re missing a lot in their early childhood education. It’s very important and our babies are missing that opportunity.”

Migrant rights experts estimate the number of cases of stateless children born outside marriage in Gulf countries is in the thousands; they say every child has a right to identity and protection regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

The women interviewed say they are struggling to keep themselves and their children healthy and fed while waiting to leave Saudi Arabia. “I have to beg vegetables from the grocery shop and unsold bread and milk for my child,” said Lisa*.

The mothers interviewed say they have made several attempts over the last two years to get help to leave Saudi Arabia and say the Kenyan embassy refuses to process exit visas for Kenyans who have stateless children.

“The people at the Kenyan embassy say we are prostitutes,” said Christine*, a Kenyan mother of a stateless toddler. “They forget that some of these babies are from cases of rape by their boss or the driver of the house you’re working in. It’s very painful.”

The Kenyan embassy said it took DNA samples from the mothers and their children in November 2023 and is “currently processing” the test results. Mohamed Ruwange, the Kenyan ambassador to Saudi Arabia denied the allegation that embassy staff had incorrectly told some of the mothers their DNA did not match that of their children.

“The embassy wishes to affirm that it attends to the entire Kenyan diaspora population with utmost respect, decorum, diligence and professionalism. Specifically, on this sensitive matter involving minors and the inherent danger of child trafficking, the embassy has assisted, and continues to assist the affected Kenyan mothers within the applicable laws of both the Republic of Kenya and the host country,” said Ruwange.

The Saudi government was contacted for comment.

* Names have been changed to protect identities

A Guardian investigation has found women formerly employed as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia who appear to be “trapped” in the country after being denied birth certificates for their children or visas in order to leave and return home.

The Guardian has spoken to five Kenyan women who say they have been unable to register the birth of their children as they were born outside marriage. The women all fled abusive employers who then kept their identity documents.

The women say they have been trying to leave the country as their children are unable to attend school in Saudi Arabia without documentation, but have been told that exit visas cannot be processed because they have “stateless” children.

Having sex outside marriage is a crime under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic laws, with human rights groups saying women are disproportionately charged for this since resulting pregnancies are considered evidence. Survivors of rape or sex trafficking can be deemed to have confessed to extramarital sex and prosecuted.

Children born outside wedlock in Saudi Arabia are also not entitled to birth certificates and their undocumented status means they cannot access basic rights and services, including medical care and education, and are unable to travel outside the Kingdom.

The five women interviewed by the Guardian had pregnancies during relationships with fellow migrant workers. All of the women are now single mothers and some say they were abandoned by their child’s fathers because they were scared of being arrested for having extramarital sex.

Fatima*, a migrant from Kenya who came to Saudi Arabia to be a domestic worker, said staff at her nearest hospital in the Saudi capital Riyadh threatened to call the police when she rushed there with labour pains.

“They said they would send me to jail if I didn’t bring [the necessary] documents. I was so afraid to go to jail with labour pains. I pretended like I was strolling around the hospital. Then, I just walked out of the gate and went back to my house.”

Fatima gave birth to a son just five minutes after entering her accommodation in Riyadh. “I cut the umbilical cord and cleaned myself. I cleaned my baby and wrapped him in a blanket. It was scary, but I just had to do it. There was nobody else to help me.”

Fatima said she ran away from her employer’s home because he was sexually harassing her and being physically abusive. He also confiscated her passport. She has been working informal jobs since then, but has been trying to leave Saudi Arabia for the past two years because her son, now eight, has been unable to go to school.

“The authorities here are not too concerned about the babies and their mothers,” said Fatima, who along with a group of other migrant mothers staged a public protest in April in the Manfuhah neighbourhood in Riyadh, blocking traffic and chanting that they wanted to go home – despite protests being illegal in Saudi Arabia and punishable by imprisonment.

“We want our kids to go to school. They’re missing a lot in their early childhood education. It’s very important and our babies are missing that opportunity.”

Migrant rights experts estimate the number of cases of stateless children born outside marriage in Gulf countries is in the thousands; they say every child has a right to identity and protection regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

The women interviewed say they are struggling to keep themselves and their children healthy and fed while waiting to leave Saudi Arabia. “I have to beg vegetables from the grocery shop and unsold bread and milk for my child,” said Lisa*.

The mothers interviewed say they have made several attempts over the last two years to get help to leave Saudi Arabia and say the Kenyan embassy refuses to process exit visas for Kenyans who have stateless children.

“The people at the Kenyan embassy say we are prostitutes,” said Christine*, a Kenyan mother of a stateless toddler. “They forget that some of these babies are from cases of rape by their boss or the driver of the house you’re working in. It’s very painful.”

The Kenyan embassy said it took DNA samples from the mothers and their children in November 2023 and is “currently processing” the test results. Mohamed Ruwange, the Kenyan ambassador to Saudi Arabia denied the allegation that embassy staff had incorrectly told some of the mothers their DNA did not match that of their children.

“The embassy wishes to affirm that it attends to the entire Kenyan diaspora population with utmost respect, decorum, diligence and professionalism. Specifically, on this sensitive matter involving minors and the inherent danger of child trafficking, the embassy has assisted, and continues to assist the affected Kenyan mothers within the applicable laws of both the Republic of Kenya and the host country,” said Ruwange.

The Saudi government was contacted for comment.

* Names have been changed to protect identities

An injured woman trapped in a cave in northern Italy has been lifted to safety, ending her four-day ordeal.

Ottavia Piana, a speleologist, was rescued in the early hours of Wednesday. She had been exploring an uncharted area of the Bueno Fonteno cave near Bergamo on Saturday afternoon when she fell five metres, fracturing her face, ribs and knees.

More than 150 experts worked around the clock to bring her to safety, a delicate procedure that involved strapping the 32-year-old to a stretcher and transporting her through 4km of narrow tunnels. Blockages to the path were cleared using small explosives, while the team periodically stopped to check Piana was still conscious.

The rescue operation was accelerated on Tuesday owing to concerns about her injuries. Piana was transported by helicopter to hospital in Bergamo.

“We worked with concern for what was also a clinical situation,” Mauro Guiducci, vice-president of the National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps, told a press conference. “The morphology of the cave also made it difficult, with some areas at risk of a landslide, which is also why the accident occurred, as a rock gave way beneath her feet.”

Another rescuer, who gave his name only as Antonello, said: “The more time passed the more tired and sore she was, but she could also feel the outside getting closer.”

Piana had entered the cave with eight others as part of an expedition to map the unexplored section of the Bueno Fonteno, a labyrinth of caves and tunnels that challenge even the most experienced speleologists.

It was the second time in 17 months Piana had needed to be rescued from the same cave. On the first occasion she broke her leg and was trapped for two days.

Rino Bregani, an Alpine rescue medic, told the Italian press that Piana now wanted to “abandon speleology forever”. He added: “She’s speaking very little, but said she would never enter a cave again.”

The rescuers came from across Italy. Federico Catania, from the National Alpine and Speleological Rescue Corps, said Piana was an expert with a lot of experience, who had been properly equipped for the expedition. “We don’t judge the people we help,” he added. “We just know that there is a person in difficulty and we intervene. We can perhaps judge some inexperienced behaviour, but this was not the case.”

France’s highest appeals court has confirmed a verdict against the former president Nicolas Sarkozy for corruption and influence peddling, ordering him to wear an electronic tag for a year, a first for a former head of state.

Sarkozy, who had earlier been found guilty of illegal attempts to secure favours from a judge, will “evidently” respect the terms of the conviction after the court of cassation’s verdict but will take the case to the European court of human rights for appeal, his lawyer told Agence France-Presse.

Sarkozy had appealed against his 2021 conviction, for which he had been handed a three-year prison sentence. Two of the years were suspended and Sarkozy would wear an electronic monitoring bracelet instead of going to prison for the last year.

Patrice Spinosi, Sarkozy’s lawyer, said he would appeal to the European court for human rights to challenge the ruling.

Spinosi added Sarkozy would comply with the ruling, but would continue to use all legal means available to him to prove his innocence.

Sarkozy, a conservative who remains an important figure in French politics even after leaving office in 2012, had been found guilty by a lower court of trying to bribe a judge and of peddling influence in exchange for confidential information about an investigation into his 2007 campaign finances.

The court found that Sarkozy conspired to secure a job in Monaco for a judge in exchange for inside information about an investigation into allegations that Sarkozy had accepted illegal payments from the L’Oréal heir Liliane Bettencourt.

The judge, Gilbert Azibert, was also convicted for corruption and influence peddling.

Sarkozy is expected to stand trial next year on corruption and illegal financing charges related to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential bid. Sarkozy denies all wrongdoing. If convicted in the Libya case, Sarkozy could face up to 10 years in prison.

Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, a fellow conservative, is the only other president in modern French history to be convicted by a court. Chirac was found guilty of corruption in 2011, four years after he left office.

AFP and Reuters contributed to this report

Chinese engineers developing chips for artificial intelligence that can be used in “advanced weapons systems” have gained access to cutting-edge UK technology, the Guardian can reveal.

Described by analysts as “China’s premier AI chip designers”, Moore Threads and Biren Technology are subject to US export restrictions over their development of chips that “can be used to provide artificial intelligence capabilities to further development of weapons of mass destruction, advanced weapons systems and hi-tech surveillance applications that create national security concerns”.

However, prior to the US blacklisting in 2023, the two companies secured extensive licences with the UK-based Imagination Technologies, which is among a handful of firms worldwide that design an advanced type of microchip crucial for AI systems, and is regarded as a jewel of the UK’s technology industry.

A spokesperson for Imagination said: “At no stage has Imagination (or its owners) considered or implemented transactions with third parties with the aim of enabling China or any other nation state to use or direct Imagination technology for state or military end uses.”

While Imagination’s representatives confirmed the existence of the licences with Moore Threads and Biren Technology, they denied claims that the company, under the ownership of a private equity fund backed with Chinese state money, sought to deliberately transfer its state-of-the-art secrets to China.

Two former senior Imagination insiders claim that “knowledge transfer programmes” accompanying the licences were so comprehensive that they risked the Chinese companies learning how to replicate Imagination’s expertise. One believed that the information provided meant Imagination may “have given [the Chinese companies] the capability to make the technology”.

Both insiders left the company before the knowledge transfer programmes were fully implemented. Imagination’s representatives say the programmes were strictly limited in how much of its expertise was transferred to China, and that such arrangements are common in the industry.

As Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime seeks to acquire technological prowess fit for a superpower, the allegations involving Imagination illustrate the tensions between doing business with the world’s second biggest economy and preserving national security.

From its headquarters in a Hertfordshire village, Imagination’s engineers produce designs that weave together billions of transistors, licensing them to manufacturers who produce chips used in everything from cars to iPhones. It specialises in graphics processing units (GPUs), which were developed to produce the flowing images in video games but have turned out to be ideal for the complex operations needed in artificial intelligence. Imagination’s designs are present in 13bn devices.

The spokesperson said Imagination “has always complied with applicable export and trade compliance laws”. They said its licensing deals were “focused on enabling our customers to design” systems for “the consumer electronics, automotive and personal computer markets”.

It is understood that Imagination does not believe its technology meets the performance thresholds for military applications and maintains that its contracts prohibit military uses. But Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Surrey, said it was hard for companies like Imagination to be sure their expertise does not end up contributing to applications such as self-targeting drones, one of the most hotly pursued areas of weapons research.

At least three Chinese companies have been granted so-called “architectural licences” to use Imagination’s chip designs since 2020. Because these licences allow the customer to request modifications to the designs, Imagination reveals some of the process by which its engineers arrived – over many years – at the intricate blueprints.

Imagination was aware of the risks of sharing too much of its intellectual property. For years, the company worked closely with Apple: Imagination’s chip designs helped make the iPhone possible. But in 2017 Apple announced it would start designing chips itself. Imagination accused Apple of unauthorised use of its expertise. The parties reached an agreement on a new $330m deal to license Imagination products to Apple.

The two former Imagination insiders who spoke to the Guardian believe the architectural licences that were granted to Chinese companies could be exploited in the same way – to extract Imagination’s secrets.

One said it had been a mistake for Theresa May’s Conservative government to permit the 2017 takeover of Imagination by Canyon Bridge, a private equity firm funded with Chinese state money.

The acquisition came after the US had blocked Canyon Bridge from buying the American chipmaker Lattice for $1.3bn on the grounds that “the Chinese government’s role in supporting this transaction” posed “a risk to the national security of the United States”. In the UK, where May wanted to “intensify the golden era in UK-China relations”, Canyon Bridge encountered no such obstacles and an $800m deal went through.

The Chinese-backed buyers gave the UK government assurances about Imagination’s future, including that the chip designer would not be shifted abroad. They appointed Ron Black, a veteran tech executive, as Imagination’s new boss. He would later tell an employment tribunal that he had grown concerned that China Reform, the state investment body that funded Canyon Bridge’s takeover, wanted to “steal the technology”.

In 2020, Black opposed a plan to appoint four China Reform representatives to the company’s board. He said in a witness statement that he informed Ian Levy, then a technical director at the UK’s electronic intelligence agency GCHQ, of “my concerns about Imagination being controlled by the Chinese government”. Levy replied that “this would be a problem for the UK government”.

Imagination’s owners abandoned the plan to appoint the Chinese directors after Oliver Dowden, then the Conservative minister overseeing the digital sector, sent a letter “seeking reassurance that the commitments made by Canyon Bridge in 2017 regarding the company’s management, employees and base in the UK would still stand”.

Black left the company. The employment tribunal reportedly found this month that Black had been willing to countenance licensing some of Imagination’s more basic technology in China but that he was sacked for blowing the whistle about the attempt to bring the company under Chinese control.

One of the former Imagination insiders said that after Black’s departure and the failure to install Chinese directors, it seemed “clear that the strategy was to get technology transfer to Chinese companies”. Imagination’s representatives dispute this.

The ex-insider said: “With each licence there was an agreement for several million dollars to teach them how the [intellectual property] was designed and how to modify the design.” This was referred to as a “knowledge transfer programme” for expertise that Imagination had “uniquely built over the years”, the former insider said.

Under the plan, Imagination’s top engineers were to give their Chinese counterparts “a proper step-by-step getting to know how you develop the GPU” over two years from around 2021, said the former insider, who left the company without knowing whether it was fully delivered.

The second former insider also departed before any Chinese engineers had received full training but said it was “very difficult to deny that [technology transfer] was an obvious outcome of doing architectural licences in that way”.

It is understood that Imagination considers that the arrangements with the Chinese clients were “entirely normal” and “limited in scope, duration and use rights”.

Imagination, which has relied heavily on US revenues such as those from Apple, is understood to have a policy of not doing business with any company Washington places on its “entities list” of those subject to export restrictions. That would suggest it has now terminated the licences it granted to two Chinese companies that were added to the list in October 2023.

A new report by the research organisation UK-China Transparency raises further questions about the Chinese companies.

Moore Threads, founded by a former China boss of the US chipmaker Nvidia, claims to have developed the first “China-grown” GPUs. But a report in the trade press says “key pieces” of these chips were taken from Imagination. An industry analyst who said one of the company’s GPUs used Imagination technology wrote: “Moore Threads have not been very upfront about this.”

The other Chinese chipmaker, Biren Technology, makes GPUs for AI systems. As well as Chinese state finance, Biren has received funding from the Russia-China Investment Fund, part of Beijing’s deepening alliance with Moscow. Moore Threads and Biren did not respond to requests for comment.

After the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494, an unknown and disfiguring disease erupted in the army camps and duly spread across Europe when the men returned to their homelands the following year.

The epidemic is regarded as the first historical account of syphilis, but where the disease came from has been debated by scholars ever since. One camp believes it emerged in the Americas, and was brought to Europe by Columbus in 1493. Another suspects it was lurking in Europe before the explorer set sail.

Now, ancient DNA recovered from skeletons across the Americas has shed light on the mystery. The disease-ravaged bones, which predate Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, harboured genomes of bacteria from the syphilis disease family, suggesting the infection had its roots in the Americas.

Syphilis is part of a small family of diseases that includes yaws and bejel. While syphilis is found around the world, yaws and bejel are neglected tropical diseases seen mostly in equatorial regions. All three conditions are caused by strains of Treponema pallidum bacteria.

“We were able to reconstruct five genomes from these bones and we see that they are sister lineages to the modern strains of the bacterium that is circulating in humans today,” said Dr Kirsten Bos, the group leader for molecular paleopathology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “They all appear to have emerged in the Americas.”

Writing in Nature, Bos and her colleagues describe how they extracted and reconstructed ancient T pallidum DNA from the skeletal remains, which included a hip bone from Argentina, a lower leg bone from Chile, upper and lower leg bones from Mexico and a tooth from Peru.

Because the researchers knew the age of the bones from radiocarbon dating, they were able to trace the different strains of the bacteria back to a common ancestor that lived at most 9,000 years ago.

“This is a time when humans were already well established in the Americas, and they were not interacting with populations in other parts of the world. They were basically geographically and biologically isolated in the Americas,” Bos said.

The finding suggests syphilis and its known relatives had their roots in the Americas, but spread globally through human trafficking and European expansions across the Americas and Africa in the decades and centuries after the early epidemic.

It is unlikely to draw a line under the debate, however.

“I don’t think we’re solving the mystery necessarily, because there are still so many important questions we have to answer,” Bos said. “We’re looking at very limited sources of data, and we’re trying to analyse them and in a very holistic, comprehensive way, and to be very open-minded. I think the narrative will continue to be debated.”