this is bbc news. the headlines — the former prime minister of pakistan, imran khan, is recovering in hospital, after being shot in the leg at a rally on thursday. one person died and several were injured when a burst of gunfire hit mr khan's vehicle, in the eastern city of wazirabad. western officials say russian troops could be preparing to withdraw from part of the ukrainian city of kherson, which they have held since the start of the war. ukraine has been talking up an offensive to capture the city since the summer, but so far they've just retaken some surrounding farmland. the german chancellor, olaf scholz, has landed in beijing, the first western leader to visit china in more than three years. scholz�*s visit marks 50 years since west germany re—established diplomatic relations with beijing, marking a turning point

in relations between china and the west. now on bbc news, panorama. tonight, on panorama... emergency services are dealing with an incident near manchester victoria station. ..the people who deny these terrible events ever took place. i have been trying to find evidence of a real explosion and evidence of a real bomb and i haven't found any. 27 people, 20 of them children, have been killed _ after a gunman opened fire at a primary school... - no—one died in 2012 in sandy hook. we reveal how the twisted world of disaster trolls has arrived in the uk. the more outrageous and the more bizarre and the more whacky theories

that have zero evidence to back them up often are the ones that actually get the most traction. where survivors of tragedies and terror attacks are hounded. i wish i could just get - the picture of me on the floor withjust this big pool- of blood around me, you know, to see that, it'd shut him up within two seconds. . now, panorama confronts the disaster deniers. do you not want to talk about the evidence, talk about the... no, no, no, idon't want to talk about anything. i there was a large blast from the left—hand side. everything was so quick. but everything was in slow motion. i felt my leg had gone very wet, i wasn't entirely sure why.

lisa bridgett is a survivor of the 2017 manchester arena bombing. 22 people were killed. more than 100 injured. i had a broken right ankle. i lost my middle finger on my left hand. it was hard. i needed to get home, i needed to recover, i needed to be back where i was before. it's taken time. what happened that night in manchester has been the subject of a police investigation, and now, a public inquiry. the only people who question whether it happened at all are conspiracy theorists, like this man. please put your hands together for richard d hall. so this is the second time i've ran the stall. -

it's been pretty successful so far~ _ richard d hall claims to carry out independent investigations into major disasters, challenging the mainstream media. very big — on fabricated terrorism. he makes money from his theories by selling books and dvds. my own book, which is about - the manchester arena bombing... unlike many conspiracy theorists, he doesn'tjust operate online. he tracks down survivors for what he calls his research. today i've started off on myjourney- to go around all of these - places on my investigation map. his so—called investigation map took him to the boatyard where lisa works three years ago. and i'm right in the tip- of north—west wales now... he made a video about his visit. so i actually went - to where she worked. in 2019, a man parked around here and then made his way down here towards the front entrance of the building. and then a guy comes -

in from the yard and i said, "well, i'm interested - in buying a jet ski," i said. and he expressed his interest in boats and jet skis. and i walked into the showroom, looking at the brochures. - he was then told that the staff he needed to see were outside the building. so there was nothing unusual about him. i could have been a millionaire buying a speed boat, - couldn't i? but later it transpired he wasn't who he said he was. not only did hall make a video, he also wrote a book. he named lisa's children and printed a photo of where she works. he says he was trying to see if she was lying about her injuries. it's hard to imagine what goes through somebody�*s mind to say that i was making it up. yeah, ijust... ..just can't believe that somebody would go to the lengths to write this kind of stuff. so i'm just reading an in—depth report of... ..my life.

naming lots of people out of my family. it'sjust a massive invasion of your privacy, really. hall has a youtube channel. it's had 16 million views. i'm the bbc�*s disinformation correspondent, and i've been investigating how hall and others like him are pushing conspiracy theories targeting survivors and bereaved families. it's at the extreme end of a growing movement. what we have seen over the last ten years is a mainstreaming of all of these types of movements that we once thought of as really being in the fringe. and whether that's extremist mobilization and ideologies and concepts, or conspiracist ideologies, not least because of this massive social media amplification of that content that comes closest to the red line, that's been really,

really problematic. hi, bobby, nice to meet you. you too. thanks so much for coming... we wanted to know how seriously people take these conspiracy theories. so we commissioned research from king's college london. it carried out a representative survey of more than 4,000 people. the survey suggests that one in seven doubt major terror attacks have taken place in the uk. i'm surprised, when you look around, you look at the population around you, and you think, gosh, that's a significant minority of people who reject the idea that terrorist attacks have even taken place in the uk. the survey also suggests some people doubt the survivors. almost one in five said they think victims of attacks were not being truthful about what happened to them.

i think some things around actions like terrorist attacks are so awful that some people are looking for another explanation for it, that it's notjust that obvious explanation. it becomes such a difficult thing for us to process that looking for alternative explanations for some people is even more heightened. survivors aren't just being doubted — i've been contacted by many who say they've been abused online. travis frain, who was badly injured in the westminster bridge attack in 2017, is one of them. the attack began - on westminster bridge. a vehicle was driven into pedestrians. i five people were killed, including a police officer. others suffered - catastrophic injuries according to the - emergency services. 29 people were injured. the doctors were pretty clear that had my head hit the concrete

with the same force as the rest of my body hit the concrete, it would have been a fractured skull and potentially would have been game over, essentially. the day after the incident, the trolls got in touch. i was in my hospital bed, and this was before any family or friends had even got to me yet. you already have that shattered sense of safety. and straight after, you get someone send a message like this, that i'd faked my involvement in the attack. and that was the first time i'd received any sort of abusive message about the attack. "you disgust me, you treasonous ginger prick. "how much have they paid you, or what have they promised "you for you to commit treason against your own country? "we know the attack was staged and i hope they hang you." it sort of set the tone for many of the other messages that would follow. "you dirty little crisis actor..." in the abuse sent to travis

and other survivors i've spoken to, the same key words appear, like �*crisis actor'. crisis actor — the idea that when you see something absolutely horrendous happening on the news, in fact, you're not seeing what's happening in the real world, you're seeing some — a show put on, people being paid to go and act these desperate parts, to — to tell you a tale that is untrue. the language of conspiracy theories is important because the draw of conspiracies is that you get privileged access to information about something important going on in life. travis reported his abuse to the police, but no charges were brought. he now campaigns for survivors of terror attacks and wants to know who is responsible for inspiring this abuse. it seems obvious to me that there are people out

there who profit from this sort of thing as well. whether that's monetary profit, financial, or whether that's sort of clout and internet fame, if you will. they might not be the people who are sending these death threats and messages direct to the families of bereaved people, to those who were injured, but they are the people who are riling up others. mainstream corporate media with its dying audiences... . and this is the most notorious conspiracy theorist — alex jones. but don't ever think the globalists - that have hijacked this country wouldn't stage - something like this. he's promoted conspiracy theories about everything from politics to vaccines on his show and website, infowars. he's best known for his lies about the sandy hook shooting. the shooting took place at sandy hook elementary school just after morning lessons had begun. the police took the first

call soon after 9:30... in 2012, a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children, at a school in connecticut. i clearly believe - from the evidence... for alexjones, it presented an opportunity. he has said it was a staged government plot to take guns from americans, and he went further. no—one died in 2012... ashley beckford worked at infowars for ten months starting in 2016. she explained his appeal to me. he said to me, "you don't need facts, you don't need truth, "you just need confidence. " and so his audience is confident in everything that he says. so it doesn't matter — he can say anything and people will believe them. ashley beckford was sacked because infowars was unhappy with her work. she says alex jones's motivation for spreading

conspiracies was simple. i really think that, for him, the most important thing is making money, it's building income, and so it doesn't really matter who it hurts or who it affects. alex jones has finally been held to account for his disinformation. the bereaved families from the sandy hook school shooting sued him for defamation, and won. he had to admit in court that the shooting had really happened. it's100% real. as i said on the radio yesterday. _ as i said here yesterday, it's100% real. _ he was ordered to pay out almost $1 billion. infowars didn't respond to our request for comment. what does it feel like, having worked at infowars? it really, really makes me feel a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. it's very disturbing and it's a trend that is going to continue, unless we

continue to call it out. while the truth has finally caught up withjones, his style of extreme conspiracy theories has now spread to the uk. i think that alex jones is the genesis of all conspiracy theories that we see today, you know, the ariana grande concert, to 7/7, to the westminster bridge. all of these conspiracy theorists, go back to alexjones and just the general belief that there is no truth that you can take from the mainstream media. there's some evidence in our survey to support this. a quarter of people surveyed had heard or read theories that school shootings in the us are hoaxes. that appears to make them more susceptible to conspiracies about the uk. if you're in that sort of environment, it does set a tone. you know, stories from america

do get a lot of coverage here, and within the kind of global market for conspiracies, america is a really important player. it creates a lot of that type of content. so, yes, it is important, those things do affect particularly the susceptible people here. i've discovered that one of the first videos claiming the manchester bombing may be a hoax was posted on the night of the attack — and came from america. ok, shall i call? the man who made it has agreed to speak to me anonymously because he's worried about the repercussions. your video was uploaded just hours after the attack happened. yeah, because, you know, myself, you know, right after these things happen, you know, the mainstream news has put it out there. i am looking into it, you know? who do you think was behind it, then? as far as who is behind it, i can't say for sure. but obviously, you know,

i believe there's a lot of psychological operations taking place with government agencies, behind these, you know? have you ever been to manchester? i haven't, no. he's in california, he's never been to manchester, he's never been to the arena but the conspiracies he promoted that night about hoaxes and crisis actors, they stuck. and it sticks because this type of dangerous disinformation can be amplified by social media. that video about the manchester bombing was viewed more than 15,000 times before it was removed by youtube. but by then it had already been downloaded and reposted again and again. we found dozens more videos promoting false claims about the manchester bombing that were still on youtube five years after the attack.

we know that many of the videos that were taken down had at least tens of thousands of views, and i say at least because there will be others that had many more than that. but some of the ones that we've seen had tens of thousands of views. and what's quite interesting is that some have similar views to some of the ones that were taken down, yet they're still on the platform. youtube says its hate speech policy outlines clear guidelines prohibiting content that denies, trivialises or minimises violent historical events, and that it will remove flagged videos that violate these guidelines. as the big social media sites commit to doing more to tackle the problem, some people are turning to less well—known platforms. our investigation has found that the messaging app telegram is being increasingly used. what we have seen is, since 2020, various conspiracy movements start to coalesce and start to build

on this platform. and that fits in with wider trends that we're seeing of the growing conspiracy movement, moving out of this nicheness and into a much wider audience, so hundreds of thousands of people follow some of these groups. some of richard hall's videos are being shared more and more on telegram. i visited manchester and other areas and managed to speak i to some of the people involved.... _ videos like this one have been posted in groups with a combined following of almost half a million. and i've sharpened the spike on the end so i canjust stick| that in the groundl in order to surveil. hall's describing how he plans to check survivors�* accounts. ok, so i've made - a slight improvement to the surveillance device. this might look ridiculous. but here richard hall talks about putting a camera outside the home of eve hibbert, who was severely injured in the manchester arena bombing.

hall says he wants to see if her injuries are real. eve almost died. herfather martin was also badly injured. i wish i could just get the picture of me and eve, literally me on the floor withjust this big pool of blood around me, you know. to see that, it'd shut him up within two seconds. for the last three years, martin hibbert has had to live with the hurt caused by richard hall. this is from the same video. she's doing better. she suffered a really bad head injury. working with a so—called linguistics expert, he suggests martin has been lying in tv interviews. hmm, he's got a lot of anxiety here, he's halting over words. h euses " , erm"

it's as if he's learning lines? potentially, it's as if he's learning lines. he's remembering his lines and thinking back to say them. i'm all for freedom of speech and and all that, but it crosses the line, you know, when you're saying, i'm an actor, or i've not got a spinal cord injury, or eve's not disabled, she's not in a wheelchair. this is notjust a guy putting something on youtube. he's coming to where eve lives, you know? he's found out where eve lives, how's he done that? martin's had enough. following the success of the alex jones case in the us, he's now preparing to take libel action against hall. so, how many people take a man like hall seriously? it appears quite a few. our research suggests more than one in 10 think the manchester arena attack was a hoax.

what was your reaction to those results? they shocked me, actually. they did shock me. but they didn't fully surprise me. it's a post—covid conspiracy movement. what happened with covid was immense. and notjust in the uk, but really around the whole world. we saw this enormous rise in online conspiracy content and engagement with conspiracy content. our research suggests that a third of those surveyed feel the pandemic has made them more suspicious of official accounts of uk terror attacks. we were all stuck in our homes online, desperate for information. so, people went to online sources which we know are very associated with belief in conspiracy theories for that information. that was our only option, we just weren't in as much contact with other aspects of day—to—day life.

going from working a hundred and odd hour week to not doing anything was a shock to the system, i've become quite isolated. alicia says she was hit hard by the pandemic and she doesn't get news from the mainstream media. where do you keep up to date with what's going on in the world? well, it isn't off the tv. why not? no. um, it's kind of... there's no trust left. she gets some of her information from the likes of richard hall. i'm not gonna say, oh yeah, he's100% right. he's made a few good points. he's done his research, which is commendable. but nobody knows. so you've got to keep a rational view on it. it's only when i tell her the survivors say hall's got it wrong, that she appears to change her mind. does that make it different? does that cross a line?

well, a very big line to be honest. if that is what he's doing, if it isn't all truthful, then yeah. i mean, the poorfamilies. i think what was most interesting about speaking to alicia was when i mentioned the survivors and what they'd been through, she was quick to change her mind and actually decide, oh, hang on this isn't a hoax. and i think that tells us that these views aren't so deeply held as we might think, and that's actually quite encouraging. the problem with conspiracy theories though is they spread quickly online, and they undermine trust. as we've seen the rise of these kinds of internet subcultures, we have at the same time seen the plummeting of trust in institutions, of trust in mainstream media. and we've actually seen a complete decrease in support for democracy as a concept, the idea of shared reality is the basic upon which our

policies are constructed. so we do need to take conspiracy networks, and conspiracism, and the proliferation of this kind of thinking, online and offline, seriously. i want to find out what makes conspiracist richard hall tick. neil sanders used to appear in videos with him. he says he doesn't share hall's views on the manchester arena bombing, but he thinks he knows what lies behind them. the point is to get an audience because, a, you want the recognition. b, with some people this is a job, this is their only means of actually making any revenue, so the larger your audience, the more chance you have of making money. and it grows your brand, which leads to sort of more opportunities in the future. welcome to the richplanet 2019 uk tour... neil sanders has seen how richard hall can pull in a crowd. please put your hands

together for richard d hall. the more extreme the theory, he says, the bigger the audience. what kind of drives people to these more sensational theories is because they're the ones that sell. one of the things that i've noticed is that the more outrageous and the more bizarre, and the more wacky theories, like, that have zero evidence to back them up, often are the ones that actually get the most traction. neil sanders says while hall may believe these conspiracy theories now, he hasn't always. he says when they first discussed sandy hook, hall didn't think it was a hoax. did he used to believe this stuff when you first started working with him? no, i don't think that richard did believe it, in fact i'm sure that i had a conversation with him basically saying, "this is all nonsense." is it that way? it's here, it's here. richard hall didn't want to be interviewed and wouldn't answer my questions. ready? yep. so, i paid a visit to the market stall where he sells books and dvds.

i can see him. ok, ready? yep. hi, richard, it's marianna spring from the bbc. i wonder if you'd be up for answering some questions? no, thank you. do you not want to talk about the evidence, talk about the. . .. no, no, em, no, idon't- want to talk about anything. i just wanted to ask you, about whether you really believe these theories, do you really believe that the uk terror attacks are staged, do you really believe that? and do you understand the harm that this can cause to to the victims who are survivors of these attacks, and who are at the heart of these theories that are being targeted? i've told you that i don't wish to speak to you. i i've told you why i don't wish to speak to you. i i don't trust the bbc. you're profiting from the worst day of these people's lives, do you do you realise that? how does that make you feel? well, if you read my book all the all the answers - are in there. but i have looked at your book, and in there are claims about the victims that

are contrary to evidence. well, you're wrong, actually, but i don't wish to discuss iti any further cos i don't believe you'll represent me correctly. j i've spoken to the victims. could you please leave? 0k~ _ i think he's adamant that his evidence is right, whether he really believes it or not is another question. but he's adamant that the theories he promotes are true, even though they're contrary to the facts. and i think having to face the reality of how this affects people he targets is something that is difficult for him to do. youtube removed hall's channel after we contacted them. hall's now made a statement on his website. he says he didn't put a camera outside eve hibbert�*s home, but admitted leaving a camera rolling in his van, parked in a public place. he says he makes polite, legitimate, door to door inquiries and he can't be held responsible for people sending abuse online.

he's also added disclaimers to his website, warning against contacting what he calls "victims of alleged terror attacks". he's taken down some videos but maintains no satisfactory evidence has been presented to prove the manchester arena bombing was not staged. after enduring the worst experience imaginable, the survivors of uk terror attacks say they are no longer prepared to put up with conspiracy theorists traumatising them all over again. it's the deceased people, it's the people that aren't in the book, the doctors, it's the surgeons, it's the nurses, it's the police, it's the fire, it's the paramedics, all these people that, you know, did great things that night that he's basically saying didn't happen or don't exist. it rubbishes what they do every day and i'm not having it. the vast majority of survivors that i've met over the past few

years, experience, if not death threats then certainly abuse, or people claiming that their attack was faked. i don't think the regular person on the street is fully aware of that yet. you just don't know who's out. there and who might be lurking in a garden or standing - round a corner with a hidden camera 011. and they've got no righti to do what they've done, taking our stories individually and ripping them apart. -

welcome to bbc news. i'm mark lobel. our top stories — gunfire. pakistan's former prime minister imran khan survives a gun attack during a protest march. we're on the front line, as ukraine makes a slow advance on the russian—held city of kherson, amid reports russia could be preparing to withdraw. they are under the russian guns. and this is what happens to them every day. that's why since the summer they've been talking about it, and it is hard to move forward. german chancellor, olaf scholz, lands in beijing, marking a turning point in relations between china and the west.