Ben Cohen, a 20-year-old Jewish Australian university student, has hired a leading defamation lawyer to sue for damages after being falsely identified as the perpetrator of last Saturday’s stabbing attack in a Sydney mall.

Cohen was mistakenly named as the assailant by Australia’s 7 News, which later retracted the report and blamed “human error” for the mistake. The real attacker, Joel Cauchi, was identified by police on Sunday morning.

The false identification of Cohen was traced back to antisemitic conspiracy theorists on social media, who spread the lie that Cohen was the attacker. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, along with disinformation expert Marc Owen Jones and the White Rose Society, an “anti-fascist” research group, found that the falsehood originated from Simeon Boikov, who goes by “Aussie Cossack” on social media platform X.

“It’s extremely disappointing to see thousands of people mindlessly propagating misinformation without even the slightest thought put to fact-checking or real-life consequences, and then using that information to push an agenda and spread hatred,” Cohen told ABC News.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)