A senior Liberal Democrat official in the southwest English city of Bath has stepped down from both his ceremonial mayoral post and elected council seat after spreading unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a recent arson attack targeting a Jewish charity in London.
Bharat Pankhania, who held the unpaid position of Bath’s mayor and served as a councillor on the Bath and North East Somerset (Banes) Council, shared multiple posts on his personal X (formerly Twitter) account last week. In these posts, he pushed baseless claims that the arson attack on four ambulances owned by Jewish emergency medical charity Hatzola was an Israeli-orchestrated false flag operation, and even suggested the incident was staged for insurance fraud. The attack took place last Monday in the car park of Machzike Hadath Synagogue, located in London’s majority-Jewish Golders Green neighborhood in north London.
The Metropolitan Police (Met) launched a counterterrorism probe into the attack immediately after it was reported, and has officially classified the incident as an antisemitic hate crime. Last week, two male British suspects aged 45 and 47 were taken into custody in connection with the arson, before being released on bail as detectives continue to gather evidence.
Within days of sharing the conspiratorial content, Pankhania issued a public apology, acknowledging that the posts he amplified contained abhorrent views that did not align with his stated personal values. “I am incredibly apologetic that I have not lived up to the standards I set myself,” he said in a statement, confirming he had removed the problematic posts and offered an unreserved apology to those harmed by his actions. The Liberal Democrats swiftly suspended Pankhania from the party last week, and he formally resigned from both the mayoralty and his council seat on Tuesday, a decision that party leaders have accepted.
In an official statement following the resignation, the Banes Liberal Democrat Council Group reaffirmed the party’s zero-tolerance stance on hate speech. “As a group and as a party, we reject discrimination wherever it occurs and reiterate our stance against antisemitism,” the group said, adding that Pankhania had acknowledged the hurt his actions caused and taken voluntary personal responsibility for his social media activity.
In the hours after the arson attack, a little-known obscure group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (Hayi), or the Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand, claimed responsibility for the attack via a post on the messaging platform Telegram. Analysis from independent outlet Middle East Eye has raised significant questions about the authenticity of this claim, however. The group first appeared online earlier in March, and has claimed responsibility for multiple small attacks across Europe over the past month. The Telegram account used to claim the London attack was created just two days before the arson, on 21 March, and the responsibility claim was published in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
When run through two separate independent AI detection tools, the group’s claim was found to have a high probability of being generated by artificial intelligence. Experts also noted unusual phrasing inconsistent with the group’s stated anti-Zionist ideology: the statement referenced the “Land of Israel” – phrasing rarely used by anti-Israel militant groups – and referred to the ongoing conflict in Gaza as “the Gaza war” rather than using the language of genocide that such groups typically employ. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a leading researcher on militant groups active in Iraq and Syria, told Middle East Eye that the claim appears to have been drafted via an AI prompt in one language and machine-translated into the other two, indicating it is likely a fabrication.
Shortly after the attack, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs released a report labeling Hayi an Iran-aligned militant organization. The Met pushed back against this immediate attribution the same day, saying it was too early in the investigation to draw any conclusions about links to Iran or any other state-backed actor. As of this update, the counterterrorism investigation into the arson attack remains ongoing.