Sun Spain Terrorism IS FAKE NEWS

After the Murdoch goons at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun suggested in this morning’s editorial that Fake News was for people like BuzzFeed and other online-only sources, and made sure readers knew that they would not dare run unverified stories, not only did Zelo Street call them out for doing just that - and on a regular basis - but they also published a prime example of single-sourced and unverified speculation to prove it.

Many of you who’ve spent enough time in Spain to have to nip round the local supermarket will have used a Mercadona store. They’re cheap, convenient, and there is one in more or less every town. One such is in the As Lagoas neighbourhood of the city of Ourense in Galicia, in the north west of the country, where there was a shooting incident the other day. Someone loosed off a shotgun. But no-one was injured.

The culprit was persuaded by an off-duty Police Officer to lay down his weapon and was duly nicked. It has since been revealed that the man has psychiatric issues. However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, one witness claimed that the gunman shouted “Allahu Akhbar” at some point during the incident. This was later denied by Police, who explained this may have been a misinterpretation of an exclamation in Euskera.

It seems the man was from the Basque Country. But that did not deter the Murdoch doggies, who, given one sniff of anything that sounds a bit Muslim, come over all screaming and go full terrorist attack on their readers. And so it came to pass that Sun readers were told “SUPERMARKET TERROR Gunman screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ opens fire in Spanish supermarket while wearing ‘suicide vest’ filled with petrol and gunpowder”.

There was, though, as Captain Blackadder might have said, only one thing wrong with this idea - it was bollocks. He wasn’t “screaming Allahu Akhbar”, and didn’t have a suicide vest. That has not deterred Mail Online from lifting the story and declaring “Gunman screaming 'Allahu Akbar' opens fire in Spanish supermarket while wearing 'suicide vest' filled with gasoline and gunpowder” - repeating the Sun’s false claim.

And, just to put the lid on it, another source of questionably veracity, Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) has dutifully taken the story generated by its fellow Murdoch outlet and parroted “Gunman screaming 'Allahu Akbar' opens fire in Spanish supermarket … A gunman wearing a makeshift suicide vest screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he opened fire in a Spanish supermarket”. The Sun has now amended its headline.

The problem is that the damage is done. The stories at Mail Online and Fox News are both still live as at 1500 hours today, despite a number of Spanish news sites calling into question some of the claims (HERE, HERE and HERE), and a Police spokeswoman saying simply that “He had no terrorist links at all”. None of that prevented the Sun from turning it into a terror attack, just to satisfy their Islamophobic agenda.

Despite its claims, the Sun is still not bothering to verify stories before making the most outlandish claims about them. All of which qualifies the paper as MORE FAKE NEWS.