There were a string of arson attacks targeting PM Keir Starmer last year. Today the two men directly responsible were found guilty.
Two men have been found guilty of carrying out a string of arson attacks on a car and properties linked to Sir Keir Starmer...
A Toyota RAV4, which once belonged to the prime minister, was set alight in Kentish Town, north London, in the early hours of 8 May last year.
On 11 May, a fire was started at the door of an Islington flat, where Sir Keir had previously lived, while his constituency home was attacked on 12 May 2025.
But the real news in this trial was that the two suspects weren't acting on their own. They were being guided to carry out these attacks by someone who called himself "EL" or "EL Money." In fact, neither of the men convicted seemed to know who they were targeting.
Today, the BBC claims it has identified EL. He's a 23-year-old Russian diplomat with close ties to the Kremlin.
The handler EL, who directed Lavrynovych, offered Russian citizenship in return for other attacks and glorified President Vladimir Putin, messages the BBC has uncovered show.
We have identified evidence suggesting that EL is a young Russian diplomat, schooled in information warfare by spies and propagandists, who is close to the highest levels of power in Moscow. His name is Evgeny Lyukshin. He is 23 and the son of a senior official...
Lyukshin allegedly set up a fake far-right group called Direct Action which was completely fabricated.
The group sought to appear as an organic British creation. But we found that Direct Action was created online by Russian operatives to cause division among ordinary people in the UK.
Messages sent in the group bore a Moscow timestamp, used Cyrillic letters, and placed pound signs at the end of numbers, rather than at the start - as in Russian...
Anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate investigated Direct Action and reported its concerns to counter-terror police in February last year, months before the arson attacks relating to the prime minister. Hope Not Hate concluded that Russians were behind the group.
But Lyukshin was plaing both sides. Before he invented Direct Action he also created an extremist Muslim group called Takbir Foundation.
The foundation sought to recruit Muslims to spray-paint "sacred graffiti" in the UK. But its real goal was obvious: to inflame the far right with this vandalism. Telegram accounts that pretended to be those of devout Muslims later switched seamlessly to an aggressive anti-Islam agenda with Direct Action.
In a Telegram group for Muslims, another account called "El" posted that the "Takbir Foundation is dedicated to financially supporting jihad throughout England. O mujahideen, be courageous and extend your hand towards the coming caliphate."
So they paid graffiti artists who were not Muslims to spray paint symbols of faith in conservative areas and then swapped to paying people who were not far-right to vandalize mosques. The idea was to stir up as much anger as possible.
The article goes into more detail about how they identified EL as Lyukshin. The BBC ultimately says it can't be completely certain but the available evidence appears to line up. When they contacted Lyukshin to get his side of things, a bunch of Telegram channels disappeared hours later.
...sources have told us that authorities in the UK and in Ukraine have privately concluded Russia was behind the arson attacks.
Hours after we contacted Lyukshin, mentioning that we knew he was a member of the Radio Southport Telegram channel, that channel vanished.
Four more channels also created by Rybar to stoke hatred in the UK disappeared with it, and the photo of Lyukshin with the deputy foreign minister was taken down by a Russian news site.
This is the photo in question.
Russian diplomat Evgeny Lyukshin was reportedly the handler of the arson attacks on London properties of the UK PM Starmer:
— Alexander Kokcharov (@alex_kokcharov) June 15, 2026
2/2https://t.co/tDsJjYMKYc pic.twitter.com/yidtrRz9ll
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