Reuters World News - Southport: The catalyst for UK riots, and my hometown

Episode Date: August 10, 2024

After a week of violence shocked the UK, Reuters World News podcast travels back to Southport, where a stabbing attack at a Taylor Swift-themed children's event has left the town in mourning - and triggered a wave of misinformation which fed racist unrest on the streets. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter here. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast here. Find the Recommended Read here.   Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A car burns during violent clashes that erupted in England this week. The riots following a knife attack that left three children dead in the northwestern town of Southport. The killing triggered a wave of misinformation online that wrongly identified the suspected killer as an Islamist migrant. Riots erupted across the country last week when groups of a few hundred clashed with police and smashed windows of hotels housing asylum seekers, chanting, get them out, and stop the boats. A reference to those arriving in Britain in small dinghies without permission. On Wednesday, thousands of police and anti-racism protesters

gathered on streets across Britain to challenge expected far-right groups that failed to show up. In today's special edition of Reuters World News, I travel back to Southall to find a community grieving both the girls and the ensuing violence. It's tragic, it's something that we never thought would ever happen in our town. And find out just how the misinformation spread and evolved.

I'm Tara Oaks in Southport. We are now approaching Southport. This is Southport. Southport itself is poorly named. It's neither in the South. Law a functioning port by any stretch of the imagination. What it is is a faded British seaside resort. The sort of place where wealthy Victorians would go on holiday

and escape from the crowded cities, such as nearby Liverpool. It's also where I grew up. The community has been left devastated by the stabbing of local girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event. And the subsequent violence, a local mosque was targeted after misinformation spread online that the suspect was an asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat. A 17-year-old has been charged with three counts of murder,

10 counts of attempted murder, and one of possession of... a bladed article. The teenager, Axel Ruda Kubana, was actually born in Britain. Although anti-immigrant protests have spread nationally in the wake of the stabbing, this is still a community in mourning, left reeling after the stabbings and the subsequent violence. I'm just outside the Atkinson, which is a local art centre in Southport, and people have been laying floral tributes, balloons, teddy bears. It stretches out across all of this central square for the girls who lost their lives.

I spent the day in Southport and everyone I spoke to had a similar message. Remember the girls but condemn the violence. I met Betty on the corner of Hart Street where the stabbing occurred. The street is still blocked off with police lines, but another mountain of tributes has been laid, including hundreds of teddy bears covered with plastic to protect them from the rain. How does it feel being here and seeing them? Emotional.

So, I mean, I don't know any of the children, but I feel for the parents. And I don't, I think it'll take a long time for Southport to just come to turns with it. I don't think they'll ever get over it. It'll just come to terms with it. And all these riots, oh, they're disgusting they are, absolutely. They're not thinking about these little girls, they're just thinking about themselves and going around robbing the shops and that. So I hope they all get caught and put away for a long time. How dare they use what's happened in our town for them to go rioting and frowning people

and causing lots of trouble? No, it was very wrong. Further rumoured violence threatened around the country failed to materialise later in the week. Posts online had said far right anti-Muslim protesters would target a list of immigration centres, migrant support centers and specialist law firms on Wednesday, prompting many businesses to close early and some shops to board up windows. The reports prompted the deployment of thousands of police officers and crowds of protesters masked in towns and cities,

including London, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool and Hastings, holding banners saying, fight racism, stop the far right, and will trade racists for refugees. But how did the riots spring up in the first place? I spoke to Nick Vant from our fact-checking team to find out. Hi, Nick. Hi, how are you? Good, thank you.

So, you've been working on fact-checking some of the information around this story, right? What was the misinformation which started this rumor that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived on a small boat? Yeah, so the misinformation began basically immediately after the knife attack, which happened on Monday 29th. Within a couple of hours, there was an ex-account with around 400,000 followers that had falsely claimed that the attacker was a Muslim immigrant. And this circulated on social media, as online rumours do.

And later that evening, a website called Channel 3 Now claimed the suspect, more specifically, was an asylum seeker named Ali Al-Chicati, who was on an MI6 watch list and who had arrived in the UK last year. That, on Monday evening, was picked up and recirculated very, very widely on social media. despite it going against the police statement that was made that day that the suspect was born in Cardiff. But by Tuesday, Ali al-Chiccati was trending in the UK on X. And obviously later that evening, we saw the violent anti-immigration protests in Southport and targeting a mosque. How did you work on checking out whether this information was true or false? Yeah, so as with everything that we investigate in any context, any scenario, we check the source of the information. So although Channel 3 Now wasn't the first place to mention the claim, a search for the term

Ali al-Shikati, for example, did not lead us to any credible media reports. When we checked Channel 3 now's website, social media account only had around 3,000 followers, and his website had no named authors, which inferred to us that it might not be reliable. Now, in this specific instance where we were dealing with a 17-year-old suspect, the only real credible source of information we had was Merseyside Police. So we reached out to the police immediately, who by that time had arrested the suspect. This was on Tuesday the 30th. And a Merseyside police told Reuters in an email on Tuesday that Ali Al Shricati was not the suspect's name

and referred us to public statements on Monday and Tuesday that had said that the suspect was born in Cardiff, that it wasn't being treated as terror-related and that the name circulating on social media was false. So what happened next in terms of this misidentification? Well, after the Ali al-Shikati claim, we then started to see claims about what the suspects looked like. So, for example, there was a claim going round that was amplified by internet personality, Andrew Tate, who claimed an image showed the South Border Taka. We were able to trace this image back to at least 23, and Irish police confirmed to us that this was indeed an image of a man being. arrested after a stabbing attack in Dublin and that this person had been in custody since then. We also saw images that were originally reported by French and British media back in June

2023 of an attack of an attack of an attack of anarchy in France. How does it feel that you do this work and some people still believe the misinformation which is spread online? I mean, it's frustrating on one side, but at the same time it's human nature. I mean, people gravitate towards stories that resonate with their own emotions and their own beliefs. And that's a key reason why and how misinformation spreads. And I guess crucially, when people are confronted with information that does challenge their beliefs, it's discomforting. I'm walking down Lord Street where the evidence of its former wealth is on display.

Grand old banking buildings, fancy arcades, and a wide, tree-lined promenade. In fact, local legend has it that Napoleon III, who lived here in exile, was inspired by Lord Street to create the grand boulevards of Paris. But since then, it's been in decline. Many shop fronts are shuttered and those grand old banking buildings are left empty. And perhaps the most telling sign, the Victorian pier, a key tourist attraction,

which was renovated during my time here, has been closed for years. You can hear the wind blowing all around me now, and this is why Victorians used to come to seaside locations like this, because walking down a place, pier was bracing and getting the sea air was supposed to be good for you. But right now, I'm at the start of the old pier and it's all blocked off with keep-out signs. And frankly, it's depressing.

This huge stretch of Victorian architecture going nowhere that you can't access. The pier was also a link from the town's centre to the seafront where a lot of money have been spent redeveloping businesses and building a big new cinema. Now you can still get there, but it certainly feels more isolated. I'm here at the bottom of the closed pier on the seafront to meet my friend Ellie, who also grew up in and around Southport, and now is mother to two small children. I can just see Ellie now. She has inexplicably run along the coast to Southport.

Hey, hey, Ellie. Hi. How was a run? Horrible. Do we go somewhere warmer? And I remember on the day itself, messaging you and I remember, other friends and local groups and people were worried about their families getting home, right? How was that day? Yeah, it was an odd one for me because I was out biking with my four-year-old

in an area with no signal. It's this local nature reserve. And my two-year-old was doing a few hours at nursery. And I saw the messages ping through that the nursery was in lockdown, following the fallout from what had gone on in Southport. And I was trying to get things loaded to see what was going on, but I couldn't actually see what was happening. So I knew that my two-year-old was safe but I was really, really, really concerned for what was happening in Southport and for people that I know here and just how it was unraveling. It was really horrifying and really scary on that day. How do you feel as a mother in the area right now, both with the aftermath of the stabbing and the violence which has ensued? I think it's so easy to sometimes go into that protective phrase of

we need more drills, we need more lockdowns, we need to close ourselves down against violence. And I think for what went on in the community centre, it seems really tragic to think that potentially would have to go down that path of community events, casual, inclusive community events would need to have a lockdown procedure. But for me, I just think how, what message are we given out to the children by responding to such an atrocity with more atrocities? The violence that has been taking place throughout England is not the solution at all. It's promoting hatred. It's dehumanising others. It's promoting violence as a solution to this. And it's not. You know, for me, I'm a secondary school teacher and I do a lot of pastoral support with the children that I work with. And I'm just seeing already the mental health crisis that is there with our teenagers, the fact that for an urgent therapy referral, it can take six weeks minimum. The fact that staff are doing things like prevent training.

However, actually our teenagers, any child with access to a mobile phone can look at dehumanising and incredibly violent content. For me, this situation, yes, we need to look and respond, but it shouldn't be reactive. We need to be putting preventative measures in place, ensuring that there is no teenager that is ever in that frame of mind to commit something like this again. And some of the protests which have flared up, they say they're really just trying to protect children. I was out in Liverpool on Saturday and people were chanting, save our kids, they had signs saying save our kids. Do you have any sympathy with that?

Absolutely not. I think even when I'm managing a dispute between my two-year-old and my four-year-old, if my four-year-old doesn't want my two-year-old to hit and but then hits him back, what are we doing? It's completely infantile, saying that we don't want violence, so look at us through violence,

we want to protect our children, yet what we are demonstrating is dehumanisation and discrimination against other people. this is absolutely not the solution and I know already that one of the girls' mums has responded in that way saying that this is not the answer. I don't believe anyone that's lost a child

would ever want to see this sort of violence on our streets which is going to potentially fall out on other children. I'm back in Liverpool now, just 20 miles down the coast from Southport. Here, the community seems to be slowly picking up the pieces after the violent riots which rocked the city in the wake of the stabbing and misinformation. But people are still afraid,

offering to walk each other home and wary of more unrest. And in Southport, everyone I spoke to underlined one thing, keeping the memory of the girls alive. That's it for today's special episode of Reuters World News. You can read more about the fallout

from the Southport Stabbings on Reuters.com or on the Reuters app. Reuters World News is produced by Gail Issa, Jonah Green, David Spencer, Christopher Wall Jasper, and me, Tara Oaks. Sound design, music, composition and engineering are by Josh Sommer. Our regular host is Kim Vinal. Carmel Crimmons is our senior editor,

and our executive editor is Leila Decretzer. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show. And to make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe on your favourite podcast player or download the Reuters app.