A man has been arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, on charges of spreading false news about the killing of three girls on July 29 in Southport, northwest England, during a dance class. The charge is formally “cyber terrorism” because it is believed that the news in question, which concerned the identity of the person who stabbed the girls, fomented the violent protests against immigration and the British Muslim population that took place in the following days, in which about 50 police officers were injured.
According to police investigations, the arrested man, who is called Farhan Asif and is a computer developer, worked for a website that collected crime news from around the world and reported them in a scandalous tone. The website was called Channel3Now, and was closed after the protests began. It was the first news site to claim that the Southport stabbing perpetrator was called Ali Al-Shakati (not his real name), that he had arrived in the UK in 2023 as an asylum seeker and that he had already been deemed potentially dangerous by the police: all things that were not true. The Channel3Now article was then cited in a series of posts on social networks that circulated widely, spreading the false information.
Pakistani police questioned Asif. A Pakistani police officer quoted by BBC News but remained anonymous said that the man admitted to writing the article about the Southport stabbing, copying information reported from a British social media account without verifying it. He also said that he ran Channel3Now himself.
This article is originally published on ilpost.it
