| Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, the UK’s largest anti-fascism organisation, says elements of the far right were “jumping on it” and starting to organise as soon as news of the stabbings broke on Monday afternoon. By Tuesday night hundreds of the extremists gathered for a protest that quickly turned into a riot outside a Southport mosque – chosen as the venue after false rumours circulated claiming the suspect in custody was a Muslim. Hannah Al-Othman, a Guardian northern correspondent who was at the scene, says it was clear immediately that the people gathered were “intent on spreading hate” and “prepared for a frankly scary riot”. Mulhall has spent the past 15 years following and investigating extremists including Tommy Robinson (real name: Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), the far-right activist who once led the English Defence League (EDL), so he was well placed to watch how the group responded to the attack. “For many of them, as soon as there’s news of anything that’s awful they start to put a prejudiced or discriminatory spin on it, and that was absolutely the case with what happened on Monday,” he says. “Those individuals within the far right who believe that anything bad that happens in society must be the fault of either people of colour or migrants or asylum seekers or Muslims instantly begin speculating.” The response to the Southport attack – in which Bebe King, six, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, were killed and eight other children were injured – was another degree of awful, he says, with “concerted misinformation and disinformation spreading”. It included claims that the attacker “had arrived on a boat across the Channel, that they were an undocumented migrant, or an illegal immigrant”. None of this was true, and Merseyside police took the unusual step of saying so in an official statement. Misinformation spreads Soon the extremists began to start circulate a name. “A kind of a fake name that was supposedly overtly Arabic sounding began to circulate,” Mulhall says. It is not the name of the suspect – who has not been named for legal reasons – and it appears to be no one’s name. In a statement on Tuesday night, Alex Goss, Merseyside assistant chief constable, said: “There has been much speculation and hypothesis around the status of a 17-year-old male who is in police custody and some individuals are using this to bring violence and disorder to our streets. “We have already said that the person arrested was born in the UK and speculation helps nobody at this time.” Such a statement, and the speed at which it was released, is almost unprecedented for the UK police. But in our modern digital age, it was also too late. The posts and speculation had been influenced by high-profile people, including violent misogynist Andrew Tate. A clip in which he turns around and says this was an illegal migrant who crossed the Channel in a boat was viewed millions of times. Even former Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne tweeted to his own 677,000 followers that “maybe he [Tommy Robinson] was right all along”. He later deleted the reference after being contacted by the Guardian, and a spokesperson said: “Duncan is very upset at the Southport attacks, which he has expressed on X.” ‘They hijacked children being murdered to propagate their hate’ | 