Man allegedly involved in spreading fake news triggering UK anti-Muslim riots arrested in Lahore

In an interesting development, Pakistani citizen Farhan Asif was taken into custody in Lahore for being involved in spreading fake news which sparked far-right racist riots in the United Kingdom a few weeks ago.

During the last few weeks, Britain witnessed dangerous, widespread, violent riots as a result of misinformation about the identity of the alleged attack that killed three young girls on July 29.

The riots targeted immigrants, Muslim communities, asylum centres and numerous mosques as well.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Current (@thecurrentpk)

The UK police authorities said that they had arrested over 1,000 people in connection with the weeks-long riots in England.

The Lahore police stated that the suspect was arrested in the DHA area of Lahore and handed over to the Federal Investigation Agency’s (FIA) Cybercrime wing for interrogation.

Geo News reported that the suspect works for a news platform based in Pakistan. He has already confessed to the interrogators that he once published a story on his news website that went viral.

Background

On August 8, BBC’s Marianna Spring reported about the involvement of a Lahore man in spreading misinformation regarding the Southport stabbing.

The BBC report was followed by an ITV report stating that Farhan Asif was the owner of the website which misquoted the name of the stabber as Ali Al-Shakati and declared him an immigrant from Syria, who had arrived in the UK on a boat. Later, a UK court announced that the name of the teenager charged with the murders was Axel Rudakubana, who turned out to be a British national.

ITV said that they couldn’t find out who is the real owner of the website but Farhan Asif has “a significant role in a network of news websites that have promoted falsehoods.”

Dawn’s sources in Pakistan said that the person identified in the ITV report was a freelancer working for Channel3Now, which collects crime-related news from the UK and the USA and republishes the stories for the sake of clicks and advertisements.

The BBC report also cracked down on people attached to Channel3Now and asserted that it was actually “a commercial operation attempting to aggregate crime news while making money on social media”. The analysis of the website also showed that all the the freelance writers were recruited from several countries, including Pakistan and India.

The BBC report elaborated that there are “more than 30” people in the US, UK, Pakistan and India who work for the site, which usually recruits freelancers.

According to ITV, Channel3Now regularly publishes sensational news stories under the garb of being an American-style TV channel.

However, BBC quoted Kevin as saying that Farhan Asif in particular was not involved in the false Southport story, which the site has publicly apologised for, and blamed there UK based team for that.

Wider disinformation network

Even though the report speculated that the website had links with Russia, it could not come up with a proof for that. Marianna Spring stated, “I did not find any evidence to substantiate claims that Channel3Now’s misinformation could be linked to the Russian state. [A] person claiming to be from Channel3Now‘s management told me that the publication of the false name “shouldn’t have happened, but it was an error, not intentional”.

Atika noted that there are chances of website be linked to Srivastava Group, an Indian company that ran a vast network of anti-Pakistan fake news websites, which was unearthed by the EU DisinfoLab in a 2019 investigation.