LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) – A Pakistani court on Monday acquitted a local man of cybercrime offences involving the spread of fake online information which fuelled riots in Britain, his lawyer said.
The riots began after false information circulated online wrongly blaming an Islamist migrant for the killing of three young girls in a knife attack in the northern English town of Southport in late July.
Farhan Asif, who ran a web publication, was arrested in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore and charged last week by the country’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA.
“He has been absolved in the investigation,” his lawyer Rana Rizwan Akhtar told Reuters TV, saying the investigation agency could not find any basis to prove that his client was involved in any illegal activity.
The court acquitted the accused after the agency submitted its report, he said.
Asif had provided the agency with all of his social media accounts and access to all of his devices, he said.
The accused had posted an article on his X social media account which said that the attacker was a Muslim immigrant, and also shared pictures of the killings, according to the case registered against him.
(Reporting by Mubasher Bukhari; Writing by Asif Shahzad, Editing by William Maclean)
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