The arrest this week of a Pakistani national suggests that prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s campaign against ‘disinformation’ in the wake of riots prompted by the murder of three young girls in Southport has no borders.
Farhan Asif was arrested at his home in Lahore on Tuesday on suspicion of cyber terrorism, in relation to disinformation alleged to have helped fuel the UK riots.
Pakistani police said Asif, a web developer, was linked to the news aggregation site Channel3Now, which gave a false name for the Southport attacker and incorrectly suggested that he was a Muslim illegal migrant who arrived in the UK after crossing the Channel.
British police have since charged 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana, whose parents are from Rwanda, with three counts of murder and 10 counts of attempted murder over the mass stabbing at a Taylor Swift-themed children’s dance class in the northern English town.
Asif’s arrest has prompted some British commentators to question the establishment’s focus during the riots on England’s ‘far-right’—and particularly on the long-defunct English Defence League. Free Speech Union director Toby Young said “it does suggest that Keir Starmer’s analysis … that these riots were organised by ‘far-right’ agitators … was itself fake news.”
There are questions to be asked, too, about how the arrest came about. The British High Commission in Islamabad has declined to comment on whether Britain asked for the arrest, claiming that “this is a matter for the Pakistani authorities.”
But The New York Times notes that the arrest came after a meeting on Sunday in Lahore between the British high commissioner in Pakistan and the chief minister for the state of Punjab, as well as former Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif. The paper also cites local police sources who “indicated that the arrest was made at the request of the British authorities, although there was no official confirmation.”
Asif told police that he wrote the Channel3Now article based on information copied from a UK-based social media account without verifying its authenticity. He also told journalists:
I don’t know how such a small article or a minor Twitter account could cause widespread confusion. Channel3Now mentioned that [the suspect was] a Muslim and an immigrant, but this has no connection to the chaos, which is being caused by people in his own country. If there was misinformation, it could have been addressed calmly. Why was there such an uproar?
Channel3Now has been taken offline.
