A hard-Left group chaired by Jeremy Corbyn was last night accused of being part of a Kremlin disinformation campaign over the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
A document setting out secret ‘lines to take’ by pro-Moscow activists matches the lines used by the Stop The War group – founded by Andrew Murray, now a senior adviser to Mr Corbyn.
The MH17 briefing was among 4,000 leaked files obtained by Ukrainian activists from email accounts used by Kremlin aides.
Comrades: Stop The War founder Andrew Murray is an adviser to Jeremy Corbyn
It says that a ‘basic line’ to be used on July 20-21, 2014, should be a ‘comparison of the collapse of the Malaysian Boeing with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand’. The 1914 murder of the archduke sparked the First World War.
On July 21, when Mr Corbyn was chairman of Stop The War, it published an article headlined: ‘Flight MH17: Are we stumbling into world war like 100 years ago?’
The article dismissed claims Russia was responsible for the loss of MH17 and 298 lives. Last week Dutch investigators laid the blame at the Kremlin’s door.
Last night Tory MP Bob Seely said: ‘Mr Corbyn was chairman. Did he know about this?’
A Labour source said: ‘Neither Andrew Murray nor Jeremy Corbyn were aware of the article. Nobody should pay any attention to this fevered conspiracy theory.’