• Sky News commissions new one hour film ‘Children of Minab’ (w/t) from Full Story Films, to air in July.
• The film features the first on-the-ground reporting by Western journalists in Minab, with Dominic Waghorn travelling to Iran to investigate the strike firsthand.
• Eyewitness reporting is combined with survivor testimonies, forensic analysis and a detailed 3D reconstruction to examine what happened and why.
• Accompanies a major new Sky News Data and Forensics investigation published today.

Today, Sky News and Full Story Films commissions a brand new one hour investigative film, Children of Minab (w/t), to air in July. Led by Sky News’ International Affairs Editor Dominic Waghorn, the film investigates the devastating US missile strike on a primary school in Minab, Iran, on the first day of Operation Epic Fury, one of the US military’s largest civilian casualty incidents for decades. Waghorn travelled to Minab to report from the scene of the strike and meet survivors and bereaved families.

Directed by Emmy Award-winning documentary director Flora Bagenal working alongside Sky News’ award-winning Data and Forensics team and Forensic Architecture, the film combines eyewitness reporting with groundbreaking investigative analysis to reconstruct what happened and why.

Built on exceptional access inside Iran, the film will reveal the stories of families torn apart, while piecing together evidence pointing to a precise strike based on outdated intelligence.

Dominic Waghorn, International Affairs Editor for Sky News, says: “It is incredibly important to ensure that accurate reporting on this devastating moment continues to be at the forefront of the news agenda. Working with Sky News and Full Story Films on Children of Minab (w/t) means we can continue to highlight the atrocity that occurred on the 28th February, deliver groundbreaking investigative work that provides further insight into what happened, and continue to demand answers and justice for the people of Minab.”

Supporting the investigation is a meticulously reconstructed 3D digital model of Minab School and its surroundings, recreating the site before, during, and after the incident to enable an unprecedented examination of the attack and its aftermath. The model helps establish the circumstances in which civilians were killed with exceptional precision, testing accounts provided by state parties against the available evidence.

Created by Forensic Architecture, the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, it is built from videos, photographs, satellite imagery, and witness testimony collected, verified, and analysed by Sky News’ Data and Forensics team.

As US officials deflect responsibility, the film asks questions about whether changes to civilian harm protections and a military culture increasingly driven by speed and ‘lethality’ may have fed into the tragedy. Moving from the rubble of Minab to the systems and decisions behind it, Children of Minab (w/t) confronts a central and urgent question: was this a war crime?

Siobhan Sinnerton, Creative Director of Full Story Films, says: “When I joined Full Story Films, we set out to make films that were important, that delivered honest, top tier journalism, and that shone a spotlight on matters that deserve to be at the centre of the media narrative, and that is exactly what Children of Minab (w/t) does. Pulling together the skills of the world-class data and forensics team and the first on-the-ground reporting of the international teams at Sky News, this moving film will show the human cost of the war on the ground, and the decision-making that sits behind it.”

A complementary investigative report, covering key findings from Sky News’ Data and Forensics’ original journalism, has also published today across the Sky News App, social channels, and YouTube, and includes the following:

• Statistics gathered by the Data and Forensics team through the use of a custom-built database confirm the identities of 152 victims of the incident; this is the highest verified number of victims identified so far.
• The names and identities of everyone based in the school who were killed in the airstrike are all identified. This includes 120 students (73 boys and 47 girls, aged from six to thirteen) and 26 teachers.
• Confirmation that significantly more boys were killed than girls, despite it being widely reported as a strike on a girls’ school.
• The factors behind the high death toll, including the building’s collapse onto the boys’ school below and a missile strike on the area where many children were sheltering.

Notes to Editors:

• The film is the culmination of months of careful work to gather and verify video and voices from Minab, conducted while Iran was under intense bombardment. That included careful vetting of interviewees and multiple layers of verification of personal testimony, video, satellite and UGC even before Sky News became the first western journalists to access the town.