Additions to AP's global investigative team

We are pleased to announce three new additions to the AP global investigative team: Grace Ekpu, Sarah El Deeb and Helen Wieffering.

Grace was previously a senior multimedia journalist with the BBC covering West Africa, where she reported on a variety of issues in all formats for the British broadcaster. She has worked on stories on climate change, illegal fishing and its impact on local economies, and mining activities affecting water bodies in Ghana. Grace is also a documentary photographer and filmmaker. Her photography has appeared in The New York Times and The Guardian, among others. She worked as a cinematographer on an episode of The New York Times TV series, ‘The Weekly.” Grace will be based in Lagos, Nigeria.

Sarah is a longtime AP reporter who has been at the company for more than 20 years, most recently based Beirut where she is a correspondent covering Lebanon and Syria. Sarah joined AP in the summer of 2000. She covered the fallout from 9/11 in the region, including profiling the hijackers, the war on Iraq, and rising extremism. She moved to the Palestinian territories and Israel in 2005 to cover Israel's withdrawal from Gaza that ushered in a change in the course of the conflict. In 2008, she began reporting from Sudan and Darfur, documenting genocide and war crimes of Bashir's regime, who had just been referred to the International Criminal Court. In Cairo, Sarah covered the Arab Spring protests that swept through the region. Sarah is no stranger to the global investigative team. In 2019, she partnered with the team to produce a year-long investigation into the efforts of international investigators to bring the Islamic State to justice for slavery of Iraq’s Yazidi religious minorities. Sarah will remain in Beirut.

Helen was a Roy Howard Fellow on the AP investigative team last year. Less than two months after joining AP, she had her first byline, reporting on the increased number of attacks on health care workers globally since the pandemic. Helen was an integral part of a project on the ongoing war in Gaza, helping to quantify and analyze the cumulative cost of four wars. Helen was part of a team of reporters, including Colleen Long and Camille Fassett, that investigated police use of force against children. The investigation was widely cited, and the House Judiciary Committee voted to enter the entire AP package into the committee record during an oversight hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland. Helen will be based in Washington.
The addition of Grace and Sarah bolsters our international investigations team. They will join Erika Kinetz, our European investigative correspondent, as part of our foreign investigative staff. AP has been a leader in producing high-impact award winning international investigations from the Seafood from Slaves series to our coverage of the ongoing war in Yemen − both Pulitzer Prize winners − to the recent palm oil investigation, which finished as a Pulitzer finalist. Ron and Alison