On 18 August, an 11-year-old boy was stabbed to death in Mocejón, a village in Toledo. After the crime, considerable amounts of content and misinformation began to circulate about the origin of the perpetrator, showing no proof to their claims. The confessed killer, who has already been sent to pre-trial detention by the judge handling the case, is a 20-year-old Spanish man.
These disinformative claims have also been shared in several languages and European countries. Maldita.es, with the collaboration of other verified members of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), has detected content from this disinformation narrative circulating on social networks in multiple other countries claiming that the perpetrator of the crime is a foreigner.
The content is circulating in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and other languages
‘The same problems all across Europe. Save our children’. With this message, English influencer Tommy Robinson, known for spreading anti-Muslim content, shared on his Twitter profile (now X) a post where claims that an 11-year-old boy has been stabbed in Toledo by a foreigner. The post is from Europe Invasion, a profile that has spread similar narratives during the anti-immigration riots in the UK, caused by misinformation about the alleged migrant origin of the perpetrator of the stabbing of 3 girls in Southport.
These are not the only posts that have been circulating in English claiming that the perpetrator of the stabbing of an 11-year-old boy in Toledo is a foreigner. Some posts share the content of Europe Invasion, which as of 22 August has over one million views on Twitter.
‘It's not like radical Muslims are trying to score points per country’, claims one of the French-language posts sharing Europe Invasion's content. As in this case, many of the French-language tweets share this or other English-language posts saying that the perpetrator of the Toledo stabbing is a ‘foreigner’.
They have also been circulated in Italian, but these tweets, Facta's verifiers told Maldita.es, ‘are simply translations’ of content that has already been circulated in other languages.
In Portuguese, the content says that the 11-year-old child was killed by an ‘invader’, ‘illegal immigrant’ or ‘foreigner’. Polìgrafo, a verification platform in Portugal, told Maldita.es that in the comment sections of some media outlets that have reported on the events there are messages ‘linking the crime to immigrants’. The same is true for comments on the posts that some media outlets have shared on Facebook.
Factcheck Vlaanderen, the verifiers in the Flemish region of Belgium, tell Maldita.es that despite their ‘limited reach’ of some Twitter posts, now X, they ‘suggest’ that the event is allegedly linked to Islamic terrorism.
Content has also been circulating in other languages such as Swedish, Turkish, Finnish, Polish, Greek, German and Dutch. As in the cases mentioned above, many of the contents are reactions to the publication of Europe Invasion.
At the moment, what is known is that the confessed perpetrator of the crime is a 20-year-old Spanish man. Both the family of the victim and the regional Government's delegation have warned about the misinformation that has circulated. This is not the first time that disinformation has been identified at the European level linking migrants with criminal acts or racist content that jumps from one country to another.