Three Moroccan outlets created to allegedly serve Indian interests, NGO finds

India would have allegedly created anti-Pakistan «fake local media outlets» in more than 65 countries, including Morocco, according to European NGO EU DisinfoLab in a survey published Thursday.

«Over 265 fake local news sites in more than 65 countries are managed by an Indian influence network», the NGO says, stressing that these outlets are designed to «influence the EU and the UN by repeatedly criticizing Pakistan».

Focusing mainly on a platform called EP Today, the NGO found that the latter and many other similar sites would have been «managed by Indian stakeholders, with ties to a large network of think tanks, NGOs, and companies from the Srivastava Group».

«We also found that the IP address of the Srivastava Group is also home to the obscure online media 'New Delhi Times' and the International Institute for Non-Aligned Studies (IINS), which are all based at the same address in New Delhi, India», the same source explained.

Using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) techniques, the NGO also discovered timesofgeneva.com, an online journal with 35 years of activity, published «the same type of content as EP Today and produces videos covering events and demonstrations criticizing Pakistan’s role in the Kashmir conflict».

Would three Moroccan sites be influenced by India ?

Three of these sites are based in Morocco, according to EU DisinfoLab. These three outlets are Le Réveil du Tadla, Hayat Echchaab and Al Mukafih. The last two are, in fact, the names of two newspapers that used to belong to the Moroccan Communist Party.

Al Mukafih, which used to be an Arabic-language newspaper, was transformed in 1964 into a daily newspaper before the Moroccan authorities banned it after the dissolution of the Communist Party. Hayat Echchaab was also a newspaper that was affiliated to the same party and was published in Arabic.

As for Le Réveil de Tadla, it is a regional newspaper published in Kasba-Tadla in 1929, according to a book by Jean-Claude Allain.

Nowadays however, these three local media outlets are English-language online newspapers that share and publish stories and news on the Philippines Olympics and the US House of Representatives. In October, the three newspapers published the same article on the US State Secretary Mike Pompeo, with the same mistake in the title.

They have also published articles on the Ahmadi minority in Pakistan and an alleged «genocide» in the same country. Yabiladi has tried to reach the numbers listed on these three newspapers, but they all belonged to an office space rental company based in Casablanca and Rabat.