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STOCKHOLM SUICIDE BOMBING

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Sweden probes suicide bomber’s Facebook

Sweden's intelligence agency said Friday it was looking at the Facebook account of the man behind the suicide bomb attack in Stockholm on Saturday in order to identify possible accomplices in the act.

Sweden probes suicide bomber's Facebook

“We look at all leads, including Facebook,” Swedish Security Service (Säpo) spokeswoman Maria Svensson told AFP on Friday.

Investigators have said they are “98 percent certain” the bomber is Taimour Abdulwahab, who grew up in the Middle East and became a Swedish citizen in

1992.

Säpo security chief Anders Thornberg could not say if Facebook had enabled the agency to determine if anyone had helped the bomber who blew himself up in central Stockholm on Saturday.

“It’s too early to say and even if I knew, I could not answer because of technical reasons related to the investigation,” Thornberg told daily Dagens Nyheter on Friday.

According to the daily, which quoted specialised Israeli website Haganah, Abdulwahab had one British-based Facebook “friend” who was friends with six of Samir Khan’s Facebook friends.

Samir Khan, a US citizen, is believed to be behind an English-language al-Qaeda magazine and a pro-jihad website which has called for the head of Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist who drew the prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog in 2007.

Abdulwahab — who according to media reports came to Sweden from Iraq as a child and blew himself up the day before his 29th birthday — had been living for the past few years in Luton, northwest of London, with his wife and three children.

He blew himself up near a busy pedestrian street early Saturday evening, killing only himself, but two people were slightly injured when his car exploded a few minutes earlier about 300 metres away.

According to a prosecutor on the case, he intended to kill as many Christmas shoppers as possible, but may have had a faulty bomb.

Police are seeking to determine what exactly happened on Saturday, how he became radicalised and whether he had any accomplices.

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Facebook deletes virus conspiracy accounts in Germany

Facebook says it has deleted the accounts, pages and groups linked to virus conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers in Germany who are vocal opponents of government restrictions to control the coronavirus pandemic.

Facebook deletes virus conspiracy accounts in Germany
An anti-vaccination and anti-Covid demo in Berlin on August 28th. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Christophe Gateau

With just 10 days to go before Germany’s parliamentary elections – where the handling of the pandemic by Angela Merkel’s goverment will come under scrutiny – Facebook said it had “removed a network of Facebook and Instagram accounts” linked to the so-called “Querdenker” or Lateral Thinker movement.

The pages posted “harmful health misinformation, hate speech and incitement to violence”, the social media giant said in a statement.

It said that the people behind the pages “used authentic and duplicate accounts to post and amplify violating content, primarily focused on promoting the conspiracy that the German government’s Covid-19 restrictions are part of a larger plan to strip citizens of their freedoms and basic rights.”

The “Querdenker” movement, which is already under surveillance by Germany’s intelligence services, likes to portray itself as the mouthpiece of opponents
of the government’s coronavirus restrictions, organising rallies around the country that have drawn crowds of several thousands.

READ ALSO: Germany’s spy agency to monitor ‘Querdenker’ Covid sceptics

It loosely groups together activists from both the far-right and far-left of the political spectrum, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers. And some of their rallies have descended into violence.

Social media platforms regularly face accusations that they help propagate misinformation and disinformation, particularly with regard to the pandemic and vaccines.

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