Lib Dem mayor forced to resign for sharing Israeli 'false flag' ambulance attack posts
The mayor of the British city of Bath has been forced to resign for sharing social media posts suggesting that the arson attack last week on Jewish charity-owned ambulances in London was a false flag.
Bharat Pankhania, a member of the Liberal Democrat party, has also resigned as a Lib Dem councillor.
He shared posts on his personal X account last week, describing the attack as an Israeli false flag operation, as well as posts saying it was an insurance fraud.
The Metropolitan Police is investigating the arson attack, which saw four ambulances owned by the Jewish charity Hatzola set ablaze in the car park of Machzike Hadath Synagogue in north London’s Golders Green area last Monday.
The Met said the attack was being investigated by counterterrorism detectives and treated as an antisemitic hate crime.
Last week two British suspects, aged 47 and 45, were arrested over the incident and released on bail.
Pankhania apologised last week for sharing the social media posts, saying: "I have been made aware that I have reposted or replied to some posts which have never aligned to my values and beliefs, and which are abhorrent.
'I am incredibly apologetic that I have not lived up to the standards I set myself'
– Bharat Pankhania, former mayor
"I am incredibly apologetic that I have not lived up to the standards I set myself. I have of course deleted them, and I wish to apologise unreservedly."
Pankhania was suspended by the Lib Dems last week. He then resigned on Tuesday from his role as mayor of Bath, a ceremonial role, and from his elected position as councillor on Bath and North East Somerset (Banes) council.
The Banes Lib Dem council group said on Tuesday: "Cllr Bharat Pankhania has offered his resignations from the position of mayor of Bath and from the Liberal Democrat group on Bath and North East Somerset council, from which he had already been suspended.
"Both these resignations have been accepted. Cllr Pankhania again apologised for his interactions on X, and reiterated that he has spent his life working with all communities, whilst acknowledging the hurt he had caused. In resigning, Cllr Pankhania is taking clear personal responsibility for his actions.
"As a group and as a party, we reject discrimination wherever it occurs and reiterate our stance against antisemitism."
Obscure group
An obscure group which called itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (Hayi) – The Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand – claimed responsibility for the arson attack on Telegram, hours after it happened on Monday morning.
Hayi appears to have first surfaced online on 9 March and has claimed responsibility for multiple attacks across Europe this month.
The Telegram account appears to have been created two days before the London incident, on 21 March.
Its statement on Monday was posted in Hebrew, Arabic and English.
A Middle East Eye analysis found that two separate AI detection software tools gave the statement a high likelihood of having been AI-generated.
The statement in English included the name “Israel” four times, including one reference to the “Land of Israel” – considered highly unusual for an anti-Zionist Shia group.
It also referred to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as “the Gaza war”, also considered unusual for such a group.
“I think there was an initial AI prompt to give an answer in one of the three languages and then it was machine translated into the other two,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, an expert on militant groups in Iraq and Syria, told MEE.
Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs published a report a few hours after the attack, saying that Hayi was an “Iran-aligned militant group”.
But the Met said that day that it was “too early” to attribute the attack to Iran.
The police investigation is ongoing.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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