Cheshire Police have announced that a 55-year-old businesswoman from Chester will face no further action after being arrested for sharing a fake name of the Southport attacker online. Bernadette Spofforth, the woman in question, was arrested on 8 August for sharing the false name and commenting that if it were true, there would be “hell to pay”. She deleted the post and apologized after realizing that the information was incorrect.
Spofforth said that she simply “shared a tweet which I deleted and apologized for sharing as soon I realized it contained inaccurate information.” She also insisted that her single tweet was not the reason behind the riots following the atrocities that occurred in Southport, and that the police officials had dragged her from her home and held her in custody for 36 hours illegally.
Although Spofforth acknowledged that what she has experienced in the past few weeks does not compare to the suffering of the tragic victims in Southport, she believed that it was essential for the public to know how ordinary people could be mistreated. She stated that the nightmare her family and she have endured over the past month could have happened to anyone.
False claims were shared online regarding the 17-year-old charged over the murders in Southport in July of three girls: Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, and Bebe King. It was widely quoted in viral posts on X which wrongly suggested that the attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK by boat last year. Cheshire Police stated that “following a thorough investigation, a decision has been made that no further action will be taken due to insufficient evidence.
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