Rumours started to spread after three young girls were stabbed to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport on Monday.
Social media posts claimed the attacker was a man called Ali Al-Shakati, a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a small boat last year and was on an MI6 watchlist.
None of it was true.
A 17-year-old from Cardiff, Axel Rudakubana, has been charged with the murders of Alice Dasilva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, along with 10 counts of attempted murder.
Despite Rudakubana’s age, Judge Andrew Menary KC made the exceptional decision to lift reporting restrictions that stopped him from being identified.
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‘Continuing to prevent the full reporting has the disadvantage of allowing others to spread misinformation, in a vacuum’, the judge said in court on Thursday.
But misinformation had already sparked a riot in Southport on Tuesday before the young girls’ families, friends and community even had a chance to grieve.
As residents cleared the rubble, and balloons, cards and stuffed animals piled up in a makeshift memorial, violence spread across the country.
On Thursday night, tensions exploded, and it’s only got worse since.
What ended in a riot in Southport had started as a vigil for the Alice, Bebe and Elsie before it descended into anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant violence.
Horrified by the girls’ violent deaths, people struggled to process how something like that could happen on a Monday afternoon on quiet, residential Hart Street.
On Tuesday evening, around 6pm, hundreds of people gathered in Southport town centre.
Many cried as Martin Abrahams, spiritual leader of Southport Hospital, said: ‘Clearly the crowds tonight show we want to stand together.’
But he was twice interrupted, first by a man who shouted ‘we stick together’, and then by people calling for paramedics.
A man with a flick knife was arrested nearby.
Meanwhile, people were starting to gather a mile away on St Luke’s Road, for a rally promoted on social media by accounts linked to the far right.
Many were masked up, some clenched beer in their fists, near the memorial outside the police cordon on Hart Street.
By the end of the night, that gathering had descended into chaos, with an attempted attack on a mosque.
Walls were torn down so bricks could be thrown along with bins, beer cans, traffic cones. Vehicles were set on fire. Police were injured.
Southport Mosque chairman Ibrahim Hussein had to be escorted from the building by police as rioters ‘started to burn the fences and throw things burning stuff at the windows’.
Many rioters shouted ‘no surrender’ and ‘English till I die’.
Ibrahim said: ‘They smashed all the windows, they broke all the fences and obviously, the chanting and the screaming and the anger just was overwhelming for all of us.’
Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised the rioters would ‘feel the full force of the law’, but the riots have continued to escalate and spread throughout the week.
Most have taken a distinctly racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-refugee tone, with chants of ‘stop the boats’, ‘take our country back’ and ‘save our kids’.
Hotels housing asylum seekers, and the home of a refugee family have been targeted, often with rioters chanting ‘burn it down’ or ‘get them out’.
Black and Asian men driving taxis or walking down the street have been attacked. Mosques have been a target of violence in most of the riots.
Numerous shops have been looted.
Vincente Valentim, a political scientist at the University of Oxford, suggested this may be the result of anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians.
On X, Valentim said: ‘Citizens who had these views already come to feel more comfortable acting on them after the election.’
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage blamed a breakdown of law and order.
Anonymous accounts on TikTok have also been linked to some of the violence, sharing inflammatory posts calling for mass deportations in the lead up to riots.
Their posts have then been shared in Telegram channels and on X by accounts with much larger audiences, despite often being brand new with no followers themselves.
It’s the pattern seen leading up to the Southport riot, since replicated across the country, a Sky News investigation found, suggesting a coordinated effort to start violence.
Dozens of protests were planned over the weekend, many of them with slogans like ‘enough is enough’. Roughly 20 have turned violent.
Some cities like Liverpool and Manchester have seen at least two protests, some ending up more violent than the others.
Liverpool’s ended in hugs outside a mosque on Friday, but turned into a riot with a library burnt down on Saturday.
A Holiday Inn Express housing asylum seekers was set on fire in Rotherham on Sunday.
They have also taken place in Southport, London, Aldershot, Hartlepool, Hull, Nottingham, Bristol, Blackpool, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Belfast, Bolton and Portsmouth.
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