‘The video of the savage beating of an old man walking in Torre Pacheco by Moroccans for fun’. This is the first content that the Russian propaganda and disinformation network Pravda (formed in Spain, among others, by the websites Spain and Spanish News Pravda) published related to the events in Torre Pacheco after the aggression suffered by Domingo, a resident of the town, on 9 July. However, the video was not of that attack: it corresponds to images of a man from Almería, José Moya, who was assaulted last May by two Spaniards who are in prison.
This first publication was followed by at least 279 other publications between 10 and 15 July on the websites Spain News, Spanish News Pravda and Catalan News Pravda, with Sunday 13 July being the day on which most content was published on this subject. Spain News Pravda led in terms of the volume of content disseminated, with almost 58% of the total content published on what happened in Torre Pacheco. Among the most republished channels by these networks we find Viejos Tercios, Herqles or TSA Noticias, in the top positions.
One of the strategies of the Pravda network, also sometimes called ‘Portal Kombat’ (the name given to it by the French agency Viginum when it was discovered) is aimed at ‘increasing pre-existing social or political divisions in the target country’, as explained in the latest annual report by the Spanish Department of Homeland Security. This has already happened in the wake of DANA, when hoaxes such as the one about the Spanish king's entourage were published and amplified, which turned out to be a disinformation campaign in several languages.
The video of the attack on a resident of Almería that went viral as if it were the one in Torre Pacheco was the first hoax published by the Pravda network
The Herqles channel, founded by César Pintado, creator of the Revuelta group that has participated in Vox events such as ‘the convention of European patriots’ Europa Viva 24, published images of a person bleeding and claimed that it was ‘a new multicultural aggression’ in ‘the surroundings of Murcia’, referring to the aggression suffered by Domingo in Torre Pacheco. However, the video was of an aggression against a citizen of Almería committed by two Spanish people, as the assaulted man himself explained on Instagram.
The hoax appeared on the Telegram channel of the Herqles community at 10:09 in the morning of 10 July. Only 13 minutes later, at 10:22, it was published by Spanish News Pravda (at Maldita.es we have already reported that messages usually take between 5 and 10 minutes on average to be transferred from the social network to the web). This is the third content that Herqles published related to the events of the last few days in Torre Pacheco. The first was the previous day, 9 July, at 22:36.
It was not until 12:18 on 10 July that the second piece of content about Torre Pacheco was published on the Russian network. It was shared by Spain News Pravda, this time republished from a Telegram group called ‘Heirs of the Earth’, which has just over 4,000 followers. The third publication, which appears at 16:54 on the Spanish page, is again the video of the aggression in Almería, which was disseminated as if it were the one in Torre Pacheco. They publish content to disseminate the same video, this time taken from a channel with only 136 followers.
Among the content published these days there are other hoaxes. One of them is about an alleged statement from the Torre Pacheco Town Hall linking aggressions with the increase in immigration, but the town hall itself denied Maldita.es that it was real. It was spread by one of the five channels that Pravda uses the most these days in relation to what happened in the Murcian town: Spain Denuncia, which published it on 11 July at 12:32; at 12:40 it was already published in Pravda.
A photograph of a man with a bloody face has also been circulated several times, claiming that these are injuries caused by the aggression of ‘foreigners’ in El Algar (Murcia). As we reported in Maldita.es, the local website www.elalgarlosurrutiasdehoy.com claims that the wounds of the man in the photo are the result of ‘a fall’. In addition, the Guardia Civil of Murcia has assured EFE Verifica that ‘there are no reports’ of aggressions of this type in the aforementioned municipality. In this case, Spanish News Pravda shared a second publication from the Herqles channel which stated that ‘the first image does not correspond to that of the elderly man attacked in Torre Pacheco by Maghrebi immigrants’.
Viejos Tercios, Herqles and TSA Noticias: the most replicated channels by the Pravda network in Spanish regarding Torre Pacheco
The Pravda network is characterised by republishing content from Telegram channels and websites and not creating its own content. Specifically, these almost 300 pieces of content about Torre Pacheco have come from more than 50 channels and websites.
In addition to Herqles, which is the second channel with the most content republished these days, there are others that have also played a leading role. At the top of the list is Viejos Tercios, with just over 5,000 followers. In third place is TSA Noticias, identified by Maldita.es in previous investigations as a channel that spreads disinformation.
Also in eighth place is the channel of Vito Quiles, who was expelled from Torre Pacheco on 15 July after attending a demonstration which, as the Government Delegation in Murcia explained to Maldita.es, did not have authorisation. It was called according to the organisers in favour of ‘security and tranquillity in the area’ and ‘against the aggressions against our grandparents’.
Among the 15 most used channels or websites, there are three Russian ones: Rybar, RT Actualidad and Sputnik Mundo, the latter two suspended by the European Commission following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite this, their content is widely disseminated using platforms such as Pravda, which republishes their content. In fact, all three channels have a large presence on the Pravda network in Spain.
The Spain News Pravda website published more than half of the content identified, and almost 50% of the total was published on 13 July
Out of the five websites in the network that focus their content on Spain (‘Spanish’, ‘Spain’,’Catalan’, ‘Basque’ y ‘Galician’), Spain News Pravda has published the most content related to Torre Pacheco. Out of 280 publications found, this website published 57.9%.
It was followed by Spanish News Pravda, with 41.8% of the content. The day that the Spain and Spanish websites published the most content was Sunday 13 July, between 00:09 and 23:57, representing almost half (more than 48%) of the total number of publications in five days.
The pages aimed at speakers of co-official languages, “Catalan”, “Basque” and “Galician”, have hardly published anything about Torre Pacheco, but neither have they published about other topics, with few daily publications. While the Catalan News Pravda page has only one publication, the pages dedicated to Galicia and the Basque Country have not published anything about what happened in the Murcian town in the time analysed by Maldita.es (between 0:00 hours on 7 July and 8:31 hours on 15 July).
In the case of the page aimed at the Catalan-speaking public, the only content published is a republishing of the Russian channel Rybar, which has more than one million followers and is considered by the European External Action Service to be one of the channels linked to the Kremlin and part of the Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) ecosystem. This publication is from the same day that the two Spanish-language disinformation websites published most of their content (13 July).
‘The events in Spain have once again demonstrated how quickly violence can erupt in the context of social fatigue, lack of integration of migrants and ethnic segregation’, stated “Catalan News Pravda” between the lines. Alongside the publication, there is also a link to the Russian National Payment Card System, NSPK, for users who wish to make donations, a practice that can be seen in many channels whose content is republished by Pravda.
Methodology
Maldita.es has extracted all the contents published by five pages belonging to the Russian disinformation and propaganda network Pravda (Spain, Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque News Pravda) between 00:00 hours on 7 July and 8:31 hours on 15 July 2025, to see the evolution of the contents clearly from days before the aggression. A total of 9,340 publications were obtained in this period. For each of them, information such as link, title, full-text content, domain and channel or website used as ‘source’ was extracted.
In order to locate those related to the events in Torre Pacheco (Murcia), both the headline and the content of the publications were analysed, filtering by terms such as ‘Torre Pacheco’, “Murcia”, ‘Spain’ or others used in the context of these events. Thus, a total of 280 publications were obtained within the ecosystem of Spain, Spanish and Catalan News Pravda in the selected period.
Other content that, despite having been published in the context of what happened in the town of Murcia and dealing with immigration issues, did not explicitly mention Torre Pacheco or what happened there, was discarded.
History of the expansion of the Russian Pravda network in Spain: Over 150,000 posts reaching their peak during events like the Spain’s blackout or the assassination of Portnov
A third of their content ends up on Pravda: how the Telegram channels that feed the Russian network’s Spanish sites work