A wide-ranging report in the Financial Times this week, aided by Tell MAMA’s research, raises pressing questions about how seriously the Metropolitan Police is treating the far-right vandalism of several mosques and an Islamic school last January.
The anti-Muslim graffiti, which included racist slogans, is still under investigation more than a year later, despite Roman Lavrynovych, the Ukrainian construction worker who was found guilty of arson attacks linked to properties and a car of the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, admitting in court to vandalising two mosques under the instruction of his Russian-speaking handler, “El Money”.
The Financial Times’ wide-ranging report into a fake far-right Telegram channel called Direct Action UK disclosed that a third unknown person, identifiable by a distinctive barbed wire tattoo on their wrist, filmed themselves vandalising an Islamic primary school in east London in January 2025, a report that also drew from our research into the group.
Following guilty verdicts against Roman Lavrynovych and Stanislav Carpiuc on 15 June 2026, the BBC published a lengthy investigation into the men and the fake group Direct Action UK, including a quote from our director, Iman Atta, that stressed our concerns that the Metropolitan Police was still not treating the graffiti of mosques nor the extremist content of the fake group with the seriousness expected.
Following a concerning spate of graffiti cases targeting mosques, Islamic centres, and a school across London, we began a sustained investigation into this Telegram channel (and related social media channels), documenting at length their racist and extremist ideologies and the dangerous and inflammatory content they produced, and crucially, that its murky origins existed outside of the UK.
By the end of January 2025, Tell MAMA had provided the police and counter-terrorism with intelligence updates about the Telegram activities of Direct Action UK (and its smaller sub-channel) had demonstrated a fixed, clear threat to Muslim and other minority communities, raising the risk of real-world racist violence or terrorism, as they shared dozens of illegal terrorist materials and video guides – for building explosives and Molotov cocktails, to murder methods and how to construct firearms.
Direct Action UK would soon vanish from Telegram weeks later, going private in mid-February, months before the arson attacks on the properties and car linked to the prime minister occurred in May 2025.
We, however, did not stop looking into them.
As detailed further in our report “The Risk of Foreign Influence on the UK Far-Right and Anti-Muslim Hate” about Direct Action UK, which we published in December 2025 (when its connection to Lavrynovych was not public knowledge or a known factor), the individual(s) behind it purchased various accounts on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after the far-right violence and riots in the summer of 2024 following the tragic murders and stabbings in Southport, in hopes of initially offering cryptocurrency in exchange for attacks on the police. We linked it at the time to a clandestine network of pro-Russian hacktivists.
More than a year later, all Muslim communities know is that the Met’s investigation is ongoing, but with no clear answers or updates, they deserve better. Tell MAMA will continue to push for action on the case.
Tell MAMA’s Director Iman Atta, made clear that: “Significant questions remain unanswered regarding the response of the justice system to a deeply disturbing and coordinated campaign of intimidation. The institutional reaction from both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has fallen profoundly short of what Muslim communities, and indeed any community facing a targeted, terrorism-adjacent hate campaign, rightfully deserve.
“In an unrelated high-profile criminal trial about the Starmer arsons, one man admitted carrying out some of the anti-Muslim and Islamophobic graffiti on mosques in London. That admission was on the record. And yet there appears to have been no serious effort to secure a conviction specifically in relation to the Direct Action network and the wider campaign of targeted intimidation it orchestrated. That is simply not good enough.
Muslim communities deserve to see the law applied with the same rigour and urgency that would be brought to bear if any other community had been subjected to a coordinated campaign of this nature, one that included not just hate crime, but the active promotion of terrorism, the distribution of bomb-making materials, and the offer of cryptocurrency payments for attacks on places of worship. The evidence was there. The question that has not been satisfactorily answered is why it was not treated as the priority it so clearly should have been.”