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A Pakistani father, an amateur Canadian hockey player and a man named Kevin from Texas have been identified as some of the figures involved in a shadowy fake news website that fuelled lies about the Southport stabbings.
Channel3Now, which masquerades as an American news website, published a false story claiming the stabbing suspect was an asylum seeker called Ali Al-Shakati who arrived in the UK on a small boat and was ‘on the MI6 watchlist’.
A social media post about the story on July 29 received millions of views and was widely shared on X by far-right influencers, who leapt on the false suggestion that the suspect – in reality a 17-year-old called Axel Rudakubana – was Muslim.
The online lies spread so far and so quickly that Merseyside Police was forced to take the unusual step of releasing a statement saying the name circulating on the internet was ‘incorrect’ and that the suspect was in fact born in Cardiff.
But that did not stop hundreds gathering outside a mosque in Southport, throwing missiles and shouting slogans such as ‘No surrender’ and ‘English till I die’, before setting a police van on fire. Six days of far-right rioting would follow.
One of Channel3Now’s employees has been identified as Farhan, a father from Lahore in Pakistan. There is no suggestion he had anything to do with the Southport story
FAKE NEWS: A screengrab of the story as it was originally posted on the Channel3now site
An investigation looking into the origins of Channel3Now by BBC disinformation and social media correspondent Marianna Spring identified two of its contributors as an amateur hockey player called James – who lives in Nova Scotia in Canada – and Farhan, a father from Lahore, Pakistan.
The two men, neither of whom were named as authors of the Southport story, were verified as real people by friends or former colleagues.
The BBC was also contacted by a man called Kevin, from Houston in Texas, who claimed he was speaking from the site’s ‘main office’ in the US.
He claimed there are ‘more than 30’ people in America, the UK, Pakistan and India who work for the site and said these were usually freelancers, including Farhan and James.
Kevin said the site was a business and that ‘covering as many stories as possible’ helped to make money. Many of its stories are accurate and copy crime reports in the US media.
Kevin refused to name the owner of the operation, saying he was worried ‘not only about himself but also about everyone working for him’. He said Farhan in particular had nothing to do with the Southport story.
Channel3Now has issued a ‘sincere apology’ for the story and blamed its ‘UK-based team’. The fake news site claimed it had ‘fired’ those responsible.
The apology contained several errors, and when the Mail ran the wording through five separate AI language checkers, four said that 100 per cent of it had been written by an AI programme such as ChatGPT.
Channel3Now started life 11 years ago as a Russian YouTube channel that posted videos of rally-driving in the snow in Izhevsk, a Russian city about 750 miles east of Moscow.
The drivers named in the videos have connections to the country’s defence and IT industries, including a man who appears to be a former KGB operative who has since served in Russia’s parliament.
Its origins as a Russian YouTube channel have drawn claims the site could be linked to the Russian state. But speaking to the BBC, its employee Kevin said: ‘Just because we purchased a YouTube channel from a Russian seller doesn’t mean we have any affiliations.’
FAKE NEWS: A social media post about the fake news story on July 29 received millions of views and was widely shared on X by far-right influencers
Channel3Now issued a ‘sincere apology’ for the story and blamed its ‘UK-based team’. The fake news site claimed it had ‘fired’ those responsible
A police van was set on fire near a mosque in Southport on Tuesday evening as riots broke out
Trouble flares during a protest in Southport, after three children died and eight were injured in a knife attack
Channel3 Now was inactive for six years before it suddenly began posting bizarre videos in English in 2019, including one about a tiger being beaten to death and a match report on the Manchester City women’s football team.
Two years ago, the videos began to look like the output of a professional news channel and, in June last year, Channel3 Now set up its website, which has been accused of sharing ‘racially motivated click-bait’.
The website has routinely changed its name and has gone by ‘Fox3 Now’ and ‘Fox3 News’ in an apparent attempt to copy the names of legitimate news organisations. It appears to be using internet servers in the US and is registered with an online hosting company in Lithuania, but has privacy features that hide its owner’s identity.
In its online report of the Southport stabbings, Russia Today – Vladimir Putin’s state broadcaster – repeated Channel3 Now’s lies. It later put an ‘editor’s note’ on the article saying ‘the outlet later retracted the claim’.
The first mention of the suspect’s false name appears to have been shared to the near 50,000 followers of well-known UK anti-lockdown activist Bonnie Spofforth.
Before the victims had been identified, Mrs Spofforth, 55, wrote at 4.49pm: ‘Ali Al-Shakati was the suspect, he was an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list. If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.’
It came at 4.49pm on Monday, around five hours after the attack that left three primary school girls who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance event dead.
Two minutes later, the details appeared on Channel3 Now, where they were amplified to millions of people across the internet.
The tweet was later deleted, and Ms Spofforth told MailOnline: ‘My post had nothing to do with the violence we’ve seen across the country. But I acknowledge that it may have been the source for the information used by a Russian news website.’
British businesswoman Bonnie Spofforth has been accused of being the first person to post false information that the Southport stabbings suspect was an asylum seeker who had arrived in Britain by boat
Ms Spofforth posted on X the wrong name of the boy accused of carrying out the attacks just hours after three girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift dance workshop last Monday
MailOnline was able to establish her identify after conducting an extensive trawl of X posts featuring the name Ali Al-Shakti which showed that hers was the first.
When challenged about this, Ms Spofforth claimed that she had seen someone else post the name on X but was unable to provide any evidence.
The activist is the managing director of a clothing company and lives in a £1.5million farmhouse in Cheshire.
Southport suspect Axel Rudakubana, 18, was one of two brothers born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents who had migrated to the UK in 2002.
Bebe King, six, Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, died after a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at the Hart Space on Monday July 29.
Today, police launched dawn raids targeting ‘seriously violent’ thugs who took part in far-right rioting after last night passed off largely peacefully despite fears of more chaos.
Sir Mark Rowley said his force had smashed its way into the homes of the ‘most violent’ members of last weeks protests in Whitehall and branded them ‘criminal thugs’.
A total of 10 people were arrested, with the chief of the Metropolitan Police joining officers in south London as they took the suspects into custody.
The head of Britain’s largest police force said it was ‘nonsense’ these people are patriots and hailed a ‘show of unity from communities’ which saw thousands of anti-racism demonstrators flood streets around the country.
It was reported around 100 hate-filled protests had been planned across England outside immigration centres, organised on secretive far-right channels on social media app Telegram.
However, come 8pm many of those did not even turn up and those that did were dwarfed in size by counter-demonstrations, with up to 25,000 anti-racist activists turning out in force in cities across the UK.
MailOnline has contacted Channel3Now for comment.
