Politics: external influences

By Richard North - August 23, 2024

Both ITV News and the BBC are preening themselves for having tracked down the website Channel3Now as the publisher of the false “Ali-Al-Shakati” report that supposedly triggered the Southport riots.

The man accused of uploading the report onto the website is Pakistan-based Farhan Asif (pictured), who was taken into custody by Lahore police and later handed over to the cybercrime unit of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

This Agency presented Asif to Lahore magistrates on 21 August asking for him to be remanded in custody for 14 days to allow investigations to continue, but the magistrates refused, granting the FIA just one day, demanding that he be re-presented to the court the following day (yesterday).

At yesterday’s hearing, the judge renewed Asif’s remand, but only for another four days, after the FIA’s lawyer argued that evidence from the suspect needed to be recovered and an investigation into his posts on Twitter/X was to be carried out.

What, therefore, should in theory be an open-and-shut case is turning into something of a marathon, redolent of the Cheshire Police case against Bernie Spofforth who is yet to be charged, and is currently out of custody on bail.

Meanwhile, argument rages on Twitter over timelines and time zones, as to which account was the first off the mark. This, however, may turn out to be a futile argument as the false name was published over a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, as well as individual news websites, of which Channel3Now was but one.

As the argument ebbs and flows, however, none of the more prominent protagonists seem to have picked up on the original Dawn report of 20 August (highlighted on this blog) which had a Pakistani police source telling us that “investigators believe that the disinformation was first published by kossyderrickent.com, a little-known tabloid on July 29th”.

With this and the Channel3Now posts taken down (the Kossyderrickent link is redirected to an unrelated story), forensic analysis of timelines is beyond my capability, but the similarity between the two sites should not go unremarked.

The Channel3 Now site, recovered from Wayback machine tells us:

The suspect in the Southport stabbings, Ali-Al-Shakati, was on the MI6 watch list and known to Liverpool mental health services. He was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK by boat last year.

… while Kossyderrickent (recovered from Archive.ph) states:

Southport Stabbings suspect, Ali-Al-Shakati, was on MI6 watch list and was known to Liverpool mental health services. He was an asylum seeker who came to UK by boat last year.

The order, structure and words used (with only cosmetic differences between the two posts) makes it, in my view, a racing certainty that the two versions are closely related, with one copied from the other.

Which came first is impossible to tell from textual analysis, but while it is said that Channel3 Now identified the Southport killer as a Muslim, it actually didn’t. But Kossyderrickent did. If investigators can firm up on the timeline, this could herald a significant breakthrough in the case.

There is another interesting aspect which also merits some attention, especially if one or other of these sites are shown to be the originators of the false information.

This relates to the possibility of foreign interference, which has Gen. Munir worried and is brought up by the BBC in respect of possible links to the Russian state – although no evidence of any such links has been found.

But, as Dawn remarks, some observers say the Channel3Now website may be linked to the 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.

What applies to Channel3Now could just as easily apply to kossyderrickent.com, about which we know remarkably little and, while claims of Russian interference might be far-fetched, Indian meddling is both possible and plausible.

In 2009, I wrote a piece about covert Indian interference in Afghanistan, with India being accused of creating unrest within Pakistan by funding the Taleban based along the Pak-Afghan border and by interfering in Baluchistan.

Then there is the Srivastava Group link, an issue with which the BBC is familiar, reporting in detail on its operations in 2020, when “a vast 15-year global disinformation campaign to serve Indian interests”, was exposed.

Although Dawn concedes that many of the websites that were part of this disinformation network have been disbanded since they were exposed, it also warns of the possibility that “the same people are operating a new set of websites for similar purposes”.

Here, there may be a significant driver. Following the emergence of the Muslim Vote organisation as a political force at the general election, with the election of five endorsed candidates, it takes little imagination to surmise that the Indian government is watching developments in the UK with concern.

Having lost its friend in court (Sunak) and given Modi’s general antipathy towards Muslims, to have a Muslim-friendly government in place in the UK must be deeply disturbing. Looking at this situation from an entirely theoretical perspective, the Indian government has everything to gain from destabilising the Starmer regime.

In that context, one must recall the comment of the unnamed police officer who told Dawn: “The allegations should not be taken lightly as they can have a far-reaching impact on the Pakistani community in the UK in particular and Muslims in general”. The Indian government would not need that spelling out.

But if the possibility of a link is theory (and entirely unsupported), the fact, as I see it, is that we have a long way to go before we get to the bottom of what triggered the Southport riots, and some details may never surface.

The way the Kossyderrickent report has disappeared is a possible indicator. Too many people and too much noise are clouding the issues and contaminating the “crime scene”, while too many people are happy to see Pakistan in the frame, without looking any deeper.

The underlying point, though, is that with sectarian politics coming to the fore in the UK, based on ethnic and religious groupings, the situation is wide open to external influences to exploit the divisions and undermine the UK.

And, if Southport is any guide, we will rarely see which puppet-masters are doing the manipulation. But if you think Kashmir, and wait for a war to break out between India and Pakistan, then we might see who is really pulling the strings.