|
?:reviewBody
|
-
In September 2017, the Facebook page The Crisis Actor falsely reported that a woman photographed at the scene of a bomb attack in London days earlier was, in fact, an American actor who was taking part in a hoax. Their post accompanied a photograph of a woman incorrectly identified as an actress named Nora Kirkpatrick, who portrayed Esther Bruegger in the NBC television series The Office and plays accordion with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros: The Crisis Actor's Facebook post, which has since been deleted, also included a series of other claims and rhetorical questions intended to suggest that the 15 September 2017 bomb attack on a London Underground train at Parsons Green was a hoax. We will individually address each of these claims, which we have found to all be either false, misleading, or irrelevant. The woman whose image was widely used in coverage of the bomb attack is not the American actor Nora Kirkpatrick. This becomes quite clear when her appearance is compared to that of Kirkpatrick's. Indeed, in response to our queries the Crisis Actor accepted that the two pictured women are not the same person. A Facebook post issued by Kirkpatrick on 15 September 2017suggested she was in Los Angeles at the time of the attack, not in London. The other claims made in the now-deleted Crisis Actor post included the following: In response to our request for evidence documenting this statement, the Crisis Actor directed us to a PA Images photograph taken on the day of the attack, which seemingly shows a PC (i.e., police constable) clad in jeans. However, there are several non-suspect explanations for why a police officer might be wearing jeans at a given moment, and in this case the photograph shows four police officers at work near the site of the bomb attack who apparently were simply wearing plain clothes at that moment. In any case, it stretches credulity to propose that an extremely complicated false flag operation orchestrated by sophisticated forces such as the Metropolitan Police and U.K. intelligence services were caught out because a participant slipped up and forgot to wear the right trousers. This statement is demonstrably false. We found one photograph of a vehicle that may have borne this license plate (i.e., registration) number: A police van seen on the right-hand side of a PA Images photograph taken near Parsons Green on the day of the attack appears to bear the license plate LX13 AOS. However, this van (a Vauxhall Vivaro) has been part of the British Transport Police fleet since at least as far back as May 2014, according to the British Transport Police;s response to a Freedom of Information request. In response to our questions, the Crisis Actor admitted that the police van seems to be a bogus lead and accepted that it appears to be an authentic police vehicle rather than a rented prop. It's not clear from the photograph how badly the woman in question was hurt, nor exactly what part of her head might have been injured. If she was photographed using a cellphone, it's not possible to draw any conclusions about what that means: she might have placed the phone next to an uninjured ear, or her ear may not have sustained damage so severe that using it with a cellphone was necessarily difficult or painful (especially in the context of an emergency during which contacting loved ones would likely have been a priority). The Crisis Actor directed us to a photograph that appeared on the Metro news web site, but that image was too blurry to definitively identify whether the woman captured on a cell phone in the background of that photograph was the same woman pictured the photograph used in the Crisis Actor's Facebook post. This aspect of the Parsons Green attack is one most commonly cited as evidence the incident was a staged hoax. The failure of the bomb to cause extensive damage to the interior of the train carriage, the survival of the plastic bag and bucket that contained the bomb, the absence of plumes of smoke in the aftermath of the bomb, and the widespread lack of visible scorching on victims — elements familiar from the scenes of many homemade bomb attacks in confined spaces — are genuinely puzzling at first glance. We consulted explosives expert Dr. Sidney Alford about this aspect, who proposed some possible explanations for the absence of damage often observed in homemade bombs. Primarily, Alford said, the evidence he had seen in news reports about the Parsons Green attack appeared consistent with a TATP (triacetone triperoxide) device that simply did not detonate properly. We have highlighted observations made by Dr. Alford which are particularly relevant to the points made by Parsons Green conspiracy theorists: The Crisis Actor deleted their post after we sent them a series of questions about it, stating that the text of the post had been copied and pasted from another source which they were unable to find. (We were also unable to find a precursor to the The Crisis Actor's post.) They accepted that the woman in the photograph is not, in fact, the actor Nora Kirkpatrick, and asserted that the [Crisis Actor] page is a satirical take on current events and history and we don't intend for people to take things seriously. Nonetheless, similar conspiracy theories about the Parsons Green attack abound elsewhere on the Internet.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}