A 31-year-old man from Pakistan, Farhan Asif, has been brought to court on charges of cyber-terrorism. He is accused of spreading misinformation through his clickbait website, Channel3Now, which allegedly contributed to anti-immigration riots in the United Kingdom. Asif faces allegations of publishing an article that falsely claimed a Muslim asylum seeker was suspected in a deadly stabbing incident that killed three young girls—aged six, seven, and nine—during a children’s dance and yoga session in Southport. The article was published just hours after the attack and quickly went viral on social media.
The UK government has identified online misinformation as a factor that triggered several days of riots targeting mosques, hotels housing asylum seekers, police officers, and other properties. “He has no journalistic qualifications beyond operating Channel3Now, which he has used as a source of income,” said a senior official from Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Asif has been remanded into custody at a district court in Lahore, and the charges of cyber-terrorism against him are now in progress. Following the attack on July 29, more than a dozen English cities experienced unrest, which authorities have attributed to far-right groups that have exacerbated the disorder.
The man charged with murder and attempted murder in connection with the stabbing, Axel Rudakubana, was born in the UK to parents from Rwanda, a predominantly Christian country. False claims regarding the suspect’s identity named him “Ali al-Shakati” without any official source verifying the name.
Marc Owen Jones, a lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, reported on platform X (formerly Twitter) that shortly after the attack, he tracked “at least 27 million views [on social media] for posts that asserted or speculated that the attacker was Muslim, migrant, refugee, or foreigner.” Misinformation claiming the suspect had arrived in the UK on a small boat also spread, with influencer Andrew Tate stating in a video that an “unauthorized migrant,” who “arrived by boat,” had attacked the girls in Southport.