“I never falsely suggested anything,” Simeon Boikov tells me.

Under the alter ego “Aussie Cossack”, he posted untrue speculation that a 20-year-old Jewish university student was the attacker who had stabbed and killed five women and one man at a Westfield shopping centre in Sydney.

He said on X: “Unconfirmed reports identify the Bondi attacker as Benjamin Cohen. Cohen? Really? And to think so many commentators tried to initially blame Muslims.”

The actual attacker, shot dead by police, was later identified as Joel Cauchi, 40. The authorities say his actions were most probably related to his mental health.

Within hours of Mr Boikov’s post on X, the false claims he amplified had reached hundreds of thousands of people on X and Telegram, and had even been repeated by a national news outlet.

I tracked him down because I want to understand how his posts triggered an online frenzy that reached the mainstream media – with serious consequences for Mr Cohen, who’s described his distress at being accused of an attack he had nothing to do with.

Mr Boikov is speaking to me from the Russian consulate in Sydney, to where he fled more than a year ago after a warrant was issued over his arrest for alleged assault. The pro-Kremlin social media personality was granted Russian citizenship by Russian President Vladimir Putin last year – and has requested political asylum in Russia.

He wasn’t the first user to mention the name Benjamin Cohen. It appeared to originate on a small account sharing almost exclusively anti-Israel content.

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