British spies shut down jihadists’ murder manual in cyber strike

BRITISH spies and soldiers have hacked into computers in Syria to shut down an Islamic State online terror manual that gloated about the Manchester bombing.

Cyber experts in the UK managed to erase the pages as they were being created 3,000 miles away. The mission came amid fears the Rumiyah publication was being used to inspire terrorists to carry out attacks here.

Last night Foreign Office officials said the flagship monthly publication had not been released since September 2017. They also said that in November last year, the terror group’s central propaganda outlets were silent for an ‘unprecedented’ 48-hour period.

Both troops in the Ministry of Defence and spies from Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ have been working together to mount a cyber war against IS. GCHQ chief Jeremy Fleming said it had had ‘significant success’ in suppressing IS’s propaganda. The military is also using conventional methods of warfare to stop fanatics spreading hate on the internet.

RAF jets carrying out bombing raids in Syria and Iraq have been tasked with hunting fighters spreading propaganda on computers or their mobile phones.

Britain’s top commander in the region said warplanes are trying to destroy socalled ‘media centres’ harbouring online jihadists. In an interview with the Mail, Major General Felix Gedney warned that the fight against the terrorists would not be over until they had been defeated on the web. He said the fake caliphate could be crushed within a few months but that there would be no lasting effect if the jihadis were not crushed online.

Gen Gedney, who is based in Kuwait for the global coalition, said: ‘They have got be defeated on the ground, they’ve got to be defeated in the minds of the people in the region, and they have got to be defeated in the information space. Unless we do that we won’t have a lasting effect.’

In the months before the Westminster Bridge attack and the London Bridge attack, the Rumiyah magazine instructed jihadists to mow down people using vehicles. Following the Manchester Arena terror attack, one edition of the magazine gloated about the UK’s suffering.

The MoD said it could neither confirm nor deny its involvement in the cyber operation.