u/UnlistedV

Hi, just wondering if anyone here has gone through the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service wholetime firefighter recruitment recently.

I got an email saying I’ll get access to ALICE on 12 October and have to answer two application questions by the 18th.

Has anyone done this part before and know roughly what sort of questions they ask? I’m not asking anyone to give me answers or anything like that, I’d just like to know what to expect.

Are they more about why you want to join SFRS, or are they competency type questions where you need to give examples from work, college or life?

Also, does anyone know if there’s a word limit, or if you can save your answers and come back to them before submitting?

I’m trying to prepare properly for it and would appreciate any advice from people who’ve already done this stage.

Thanks.

A film about The Jeremy Kyle Show in the same kind of style could actually be really interesting. The whole 2000s daytime TV era, the producers, the guests, Jeremy himself, and the way people's personal problems were turned into entertainment.

Would anyone actually watch a film like that? And which actor do you think is the perfect candidate to portray him?

In January 2018, a cardboard box was found inside a shelter in West Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, not far from Edinburgh Castle.

Police closed part of the gardens while bomb disposal officers examined it. At first, it did not appear to be anything particularly serious. The device was destroyed in a controlled explosion and was initially described as an elaborate hoax.

That assessment later changed.

Forensic examination found that the box had actually contained a viable improvised explosive device capable of causing injury and damage. Police Scotland launched an investigation through its Organised Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, with assistance from the wider UK Counter Terrorism Policing network.

The person responsible was eventually caught. His name was Nikolaos Karvounakis, a Greek national living in Edinburgh. He pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to more than eight years in prison.

On the surface, that seems to be the end of the story.

But there is a strange part of the case which received remarkably little attention.

A few weeks after the device was discovered, a journalist received an anonymous email with the subject line "International Terrorist Group in UK". The email directed the recipient towards a statement published on a website associated with an extremist movement originating in Mexico known as Individualists Tending to the Wild, usually abbreviated to ITS.

The statement claimed responsibility for the Edinburgh device.

Whoever was behind it apparently knew more than somebody simply following the story in the news. The statement was accompanied by a photograph showing the inside of the device before it had been left in Princes Street Gardens.

The author used the name "Misanthropos Cacogen".

There were actually two versions of the statement, one in English and another in Spanish. Years later, forensic linguists who had worked with Police Scotland on the investigation published an academic paper describing how they had analysed the texts.

Their findings produced the first odd turn in the story.

The English version appeared to have been written by somebody who was not a native English speaker. However, their English did not appear to show the influence expected from a native Spanish speaker.

The Spanish text, meanwhile, appeared to have been translated from the English rather than the other way around.

So a statement appearing in the online environment of a Mexican extremist movement seems to have originated in English, written by someone whose first language probably wasn't English or Spanish, before being translated into Spanish.

That wasn't the only unusual detail.

The statement apparently claimed responsibility for three incidents.

One was the device in Princes Street Gardens.

The other two were described as the arson of two buses.

And that is where the story becomes difficult to follow.

The Edinburgh device can be identified. It generated news reports, police appeals, forensic evidence, court proceedings and eventually a conviction.

But what were the two bus arsons?

The detail appears in the later academic account of the investigation, yet it is barely visible in reporting about the case. The public accounts of Karvounakis's prosecution concentrate overwhelmingly on the Edinburgh device.

If the claim about the buses was genuine, it raises an obvious question about where and when those attacks happened and whether they were ever publicly connected to the same investigation.

If it wasn't genuine, that raises another question.

Why would whoever produced an apparently authentic claim of responsibility for the Edinburgh device also claim two attacks they hadn't committed?

The authenticity issue matters because this was not simply somebody attaching themselves to an event already reported in the press. The statement contained the photograph of the device's interior.

Police eventually identified Karvounakis as a suspect with assistance from European law-enforcement agencies. But when his electronic devices were examined, investigators encountered another problem.

According to the forensic linguists who worked on the case, they did not find the original claim of responsibility or even a link to it on his devices.

Instead, the investigation began moving through other writings associated with him.

Karvounakis was involved with a band called Face of Another. Material associated with the band's website provided investigators with samples of writing that could be compared with anonymous extremist texts.

Police Scotland then used forensic linguistic analysis to examine similarities between the material.

One of the stranger pieces of supporting evidence involved neither bombs nor language.

It involved clouds.

A photograph connected with Karvounakis's band apparently showed a cloud formation that could be matched with a photograph which had appeared on the extremist blog. A forensic meteorologist became involved in examining the images.

The investigation had now travelled from a cardboard box in an Edinburgh park to an anonymous bilingual statement on a Mexican extremist website, linguistic analysis of a rock band's writings and forensic examination of cloud formations.

A search of Karvounakis's devices then uncovered another pseudonym associated with him: "Archegonos".

That identity led investigators into a larger collection of extremist writings, including publications called Paroxysm of Chaos I and II.

These weren't simply documents written by one identifiable author. They contained contributions associated with several names and pseudonyms, while the authorship of some material was uncertain. The forensic researchers had to separate texts according to which material could reliably be attributed to particular writers and which could not.

That complicates the original anonymous statement.

Was "Misanthropos Cacogen" simply another name used by Karvounakis?

Did Karvounakis write the statement but somebody else translate or publish it?

Was material being passed between several people?

How much of the wider online network represented actual cooperation between individuals in different countries, rather than people independently publishing material under the same ideological banner?

There was another complication in the criminal investigation.

Karvounakis was not the only person originally arrested.

In June 2021 Police Scotland arrested Karvounakis and a woman named Artemis Parissi in connection with the Edinburgh device. Both appeared in court facing serious charges. The charges against Parissi were subsequently dropped.

There is nothing inherently unusual about charges being dropped when prosecutors decide the available evidence does not justify continuing a case, and there is no basis for suggesting Parissi was involved in anything criminal.

What is less clear from the publicly available accounts is why investigators initially suspected two people and what changed.

Karvounakis's own involvement in the explosive device is not seriously mysterious. Investigators found strong physical and circumstantial evidence, including his DNA on adhesive tape used in its construction and evidence concerning the purchase of components. He ultimately pleaded guilty to possessing explosive material in circumstances giving rise to a reasonable suspicion that it was connected with terrorism.

What seems less completely resolved in public is everything surrounding the anonymous communication.

The forensic linguistic evidence supported the proposition that Karvounakis could have authored the disputed material, but linguistic comparison cannot by itself establish authorship with certainty.

And because Karvounakis pleaded guilty, there was never a full trial in which every part of the prosecution's account of the anonymous statement had to be tested before a jury.

Even the wording used at sentencing is interesting. In discussing the online claim, Lord Braid referred to material that Karvounakis had "posted, or at least caused to be posted".

That leaves a surprisingly large amount of space between the solved part of the case and the public record surrounding it.

Someone built and left the Princes Street Gardens device. That person was identified.

Someone photographed the inside of it before it was discovered.

Someone wrote the English statement attributed to "Misanthropos Cacogen".

Someone translated it into Spanish, possibly with assistance or correction from another speaker.

Someone uploaded it to an extremist website.

Someone sent the anonymous email directing a journalist towards it.

And somewhere within that same statement, responsibility was claimed for two bus arsons which seem to have almost completely disappeared from the later public story.

Those things may all have been done by Karvounakis. Some may have involved other people. There may also be perfectly ordinary explanations buried in investigative material that has never been made public.

But the two buses remain the detail that is hardest to get past.

If the attacks happened, what incidents were being referred to?

Were they in Scotland, Greece or somewhere else?

Were they investigated as ordinary vehicle fires without their possible connection becoming public?

Did the anonymous statement contain information proving that its author genuinely knew something about them?

Did investigators determine that the claims were false?

And if they were false, why were two invented attacks included alongside a claim about the Edinburgh device that was backed up by an unpublished photograph from inside the bomb?

The strange thing about the Princes Street Gardens case isn't that nobody knows who planted the bomb.

Police solved that.

It's that solving the bomb appears to have left another, much less noticed question behind: what exactly was "Misanthropos Cacogen" claiming responsibility for, and what happened to the other two attacks?

SOURCES:

Clarke, Isobelle & Grant, Tim: forensic linguistics paper on the Karvounakis investigation:

https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/eprint/47651/3/Clarke\_Grant.pdf

Police Scotland: sentencing of Nikolaos Karvounakis:

https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/2022/february/police-scotland-welcomes-sentencing-of-nikolaos-karvounakis/

Police Scotland: conviction of Nikolaos Karvounakis:

https://www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happening/news/2022/january/35-year-old-man-convicted-of-terrorist-offence-after-improvised-explosive-device-left-in-princes-street-gardens/

Judiciary of Scotland: HMA v Nikolaos Karvounakis, Lord Braid's sentencing statement:

https://www.judiciary.scot/home/sentences-judgments/sentences-and-opinions/2022/02/16/hma-v-nikolaos-karvounakis

Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service: terrorism prosecutions in Scotland (see Nikolaos Karvounakis):

https://www.copfs.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism-prosecutions-in-scotland/

Aston University: how forensic linguistics helped Police Scotland secure the conviction:

https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/linguistics-expert-aston-university-helps-police-scotland-secure-terrorism-conviction

Aston University: later account of the linguistic investigation, including the photograph of the bomb interior and forensic meteorology:

https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/how-authorship-language-helped-catch-domestic-terrorist-new-podcast

The Edinburgh Reporter: original report on the suspicious package, 11 January 2018:

https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2018/01/suspicious-package-found-in-kings-stable-road/

The Edinburgh Reporter: February 2018 appeal after forensic examination established that the package could cause injury:

https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2018/02/fresh-appeal-following-discovery-of-suspicious-package-in-princes-street-gardens/

STV News archive: original report, 11 January 2018:

https://archive.news.stv.tv/archive/1406068-suspicious-package-near-edinburgh-castle-investigated.html

STV News archive: police reveal the supposed "hoax" could actually cause injury, 21 February 2018:

https://archive.news.stv.tv/east-central/1408786-device-found-near-edinburgh-castle-may-have-been-bomb.html

STV News: Karvounakis pleads guilty; details of the anonymous email and claim of responsibility:

https://news.stv.tv/east-central/man-left-homemade-bomb-with-note-in-princes-street-gardens

Evening Standard/PA: two people arrested in June 2021:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/edinburgh-police-head-crime-king-b940747.html

Evening Standard/PA: Karvounakis and Artemis Parissi appear in court; later update notes that the charges against Parissi were dropped:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/edinburgh-b941169.html

In 2021, a man in North Lanarkshire went onto the dark web looking for someone to kill a former Scottish prosecutor. On the surface, it sounds like a fairly straightforward failed murder-for-hire plot. The intended victim survived, the person responsible was eventually caught, and the case went to court.

The strange part is that the hitmen apparently never existed.

Martin Ready, from Coatbridge, became convinced that he wanted Darren Harty dead. Harty had previously worked as a procurator fiscal and Ready knew him from a pub owned by Harty's family, although the two were not close. Harty would later say that he had no idea why Ready wanted to kill him.

Between May 2021 and September 2022, Ready began searching the internet for ways of arranging Harty's murder. He created cryptocurrency accounts and used the name "HarryBrown" while accessing websites advertising contract killings.

One of them was called Online Killers Market.

Another site, hire-a-hitman.pw, supposedly ranked assassination services according to their reliability. Online Killers was listed as the most trusted. The sites offered different kinds of killings, including attacks against heavily protected targets, with prices running into tens of thousands of dollars.

Ready eventually placed an order with the remarkably blunt title "Simple shoot and run."

He provided information about Harty and described him as an easy target. Another posting in September 2022 advertised a UK job worth around $6,000 and indicated that the target's routine was known, that there was a suitable location for the attack and that Harty had no idea somebody was planning to kill him.

Ready ultimately transferred 0.2913 Bitcoin, then worth just over £5,000, to the administrator of Online Killers Market.

Nothing happened.

Ready hadn't hired a professional assassin. Online Killers Market was a scam.

That might have been the end of the story: someone attempts to buy a murder on the dark web, sends thousands of pounds to an anonymous scammer and discovers that the supposed assassins don't exist.

Except other people were apparently interacting with the murder request.

According to evidence presented during Ready's trial, an account called "MrMortis" responded to the proposed job in September 2022. The user indicated that whoever carried out the killing would choose the location themselves but was willing to discuss it. Six days later, another account using the name "Antibiotic" also expressed interest.

Who those accounts actually belonged to isn't clear from the publicly reported case.

They could simply have been additional accounts controlled by whoever operated the scam. They could have been unrelated scammers. They could have been people playing along with what they assumed was fantasy. There is also the more disturbing possibility that genuine criminals were wandering around inside a fraudulent murder-for-hire marketplace.

Then somebody else entered the story.

Ready wasn't initially exposed because a hitman betrayed him or because Harty discovered the plot. An investigative journalist researching a documentary about the dark web reportedly found the murder request.

The journalist contacted the Metropolitan Police, who passed the information to Police Scotland. Officers eventually searched Ready's home, and evidence on his phone helped connect him to the websites and communications.

The identity of that journalist, exactly how the plot was discovered and what access they had to the website aren't obvious from the mainstream reporting of Ready's case.

That becomes important because the story of Online Killers Market didn't end in Scotland.

Only a few months later, the same name appeared in a completely separate attempted murder-for-hire investigation thousands of miles away.

At the end of December 2022, a woman in Tennessee named Melody Sasser began trying to arrange the murder of another woman. Like Ready, she turned to Online Killers Market.

Sasser supplied information about her intended victim, including photographs and location details, and eventually sent nearly $10,000 in cryptocurrency to the website. She apparently believed the service was genuine. When the woman remained alive, Sasser became impatient and repeatedly contacted the site's administrator asking why the killing hadn't happened.

Again, there was no assassin.

Again, Online Killers Market took the money.

But the way American investigators learned about the plot is probably the strangest part of the whole story.

According to the federal criminal complaint against Sasser, on 27 April 2023 Homeland Security Investigations received information about the attempted murder from a "foreign law enforcement agency."

That information apparently included communications between Sasser and the administrator of Online Killers Market.

The timeline is difficult to ignore.

In 2021 and 2022, Martin Ready used Online Killers Market in Scotland. In September 2022, a journalist researching the dark web discovered his murder request and alerted British authorities. A few months later, Melody Sasser began using the same supposed assassination service in America. Then, in April 2023, a foreign law-enforcement agency supplied American investigators with information concerning communications taking place through that marketplace.

Somebody, somewhere, appears to have gained considerable visibility into what was happening on Online Killers Market.

The public information doesn't seem to provide a simple explanation for exactly who had that access or how they obtained it.

There are several perfectly mundane possibilities. Investigators may have compromised or seized part of the site's infrastructure. A researcher could have obtained information and passed it to law enforcement. Authorities may have been tracing cryptocurrency transactions. The administrator could conceivably have provided information. Different people may also have had access at different points.

But whatever happened, it creates a much larger question.

Online Killers Market may have been fake, but some of its customers clearly weren't.

Ready genuinely wanted Harty killed. Sasser genuinely wanted another woman killed. Both provided information about real people and paid substantial amounts of cryptocurrency because they believed they were commissioning murders.

That means whoever operated the scam potentially accumulated something much more disturbing than stolen Bitcoin: a database of genuine murder solicitations.

Names. Photographs. Addresses. Routines. Vehicles. Proposed locations. Messages from people discussing how and where somebody could be killed.

And Ready and Sasser are only the customers who happened to end up in publicly reported criminal proceedings.

It's unknown from the available reporting how many other people used Online Killers Market, how many intended victims were identified, whether all credible threats discovered in its records were passed to police, or what eventually happened to the site's data.

There is another unanswered question about the supposed assassins themselves. If Online Killers Market was fraudulent, who were accounts such as "MrMortis" and "Antibiotic"? Were they characters created by the administrator to convince customers that assassins were bidding for jobs? Were several scammers operating the marketplace together? Or could outsiders communicate with customers through the site?

Even the wider ecosystem is murky. When investigators searched Sasser's home, they reportedly found a journal containing a list of other supposed hitman websites. Online Killers Market therefore wasn't necessarily an isolated operation. It existed among a collection of websites claiming to sell murder for cryptocurrency, some or perhaps most of which appear to have been scams.

Ready's own motivation ultimately seems less mysterious than the system he stumbled into. He suffered from serious psychiatric problems and made bizarre claims about exposing organised crime in Coatbridge. A jury nevertheless rejected his defence that he lacked criminal responsibility, and he was eventually ordered to be detained indefinitely.

But solving the question of why Ready wanted Harty dead doesn't solve the more interesting mystery created by his case.

Who actually operated Online Killers Market?

Who controlled the accounts supposedly responding to assassination requests?

How did the journalist investigating the dark web discover Ready's order?

How much information about the marketplace subsequently came into the possession of law enforcement?

Was the unidentified foreign agency that supplied information to American investigators connected in any way to the earlier British investigation?

And, potentially most importantly, how many other genuine murder requests passed through the site?

The irony is that the fake nature of Online Killers Market arguably makes the story stranger rather than less interesting. A genuine assassination marketplace would be horrifying but conceptually simple: criminals paying criminals to murder people.

Online Killers Market appears to have been something considerably stranger.

Someone built a service pretending to sell murder, attracted people who actually wanted other human beings killed, collected their cryptocurrency and apparently never provided the promised assassins. In doing so, the operators may inadvertently have created a repository containing evidence of real attempted murder plots from different countries.

At least two customers are now known because their intended victims were identified before anybody was killed.

The unanswered question is how many others were in there.

Sources:

https://www.scottishlegal.com/articles/man-accused-of-dark-web-plot-to-have-former-fiscal-assassinated

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/high-court-glasgow-london-instagram-north-lanarkshire-b2600878.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/high-court-edinburgh-glasgow-north-lanarkshire-b2679252.html

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/glasgow-high-court-bitcoin-north-lanarkshire-b1262967.html

https://news.sky.com/story/evil-jesus-who-plotted-to-kill-prosecutor-detained-at-secure-mental-health-facility-indefinitely-13484728

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/crime-courts/6327383/procurator-fiscal-murder-plot/

https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2023/06/melody-sasser-commplaint.pdf

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/melody-sasser-charged-hiring-hitman-match-com-dating-site/

In 2014, Northumbria Police launched Operation Sanctuary, an investigation into the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women and girls in Newcastle and the surrounding area. It eventually became a major investigation involving hundreds of potential victims and numerous suspects.

Buried within the story of Operation Sanctuary, however, is the strange case of a man whose real identity has never been made public. In court and in subsequent reporting, he was simply called "XY".

XY was a police informant. He was also a convicted child rapist.

Northumbria Police paid him £9,680 over roughly 21 months to provide intelligence during Operation Sanctuary. He was apparently useful because he knew people within the communities police were investigating and worked informally as a taxi driver, giving him access to individuals and places that were difficult for officers to penetrate through conventional policing.

What makes the story considerably stranger is that Sanctuary wasn't the beginning of XY's relationship with the police.

By the time he became involved in the operation, he had apparently already been working as an informant for Northumbria Police for several years. His criminal record was extensive. A later BBC investigation reported that he had 53 previous convictions, including offences involving fraud and assault.

He had also apparently received benefits from cooperating with the police. Information about his assistance could be provided confidentially to judges when he was being sentenced, potentially resulting in more lenient treatment.

Despite his background, police considered his intelligence valuable enough to use him in an investigation specifically concerned with the exploitation of vulnerable women and children.

And while he was working for them, XY continued attracting police attention himself.

He was arrested over allegations involving dishonesty, an assault at a mosque and breaches of requirements imposed on him as a sex offender. He was also questioned about an allegation concerning a 13-year-old girl.

Then, in March 2016, something happened between XY and his police handler.

The relationship apparently collapsed.

XY threatened to go to the media and began making serious allegations against Northumbria Police. Among other things, he claimed that officers had behaved improperly and alleged that police had asked him to plant drugs.

That caused a serious problem for Operation Sanctuary.

Defence lawyers representing people being prosecuted as part of the investigation learned about XY and argued that what had happened between him and the police was serious enough for proceedings to be stopped as an abuse of process.

Suddenly the police informant who had been helping the investigation had become part of a legal battle that threatened the investigation itself.

By the time XY appeared at Newcastle Crown Court, he and his family had reportedly been moved out of the area and placed under round-the-clock police protection. He gave evidence from behind a screen.

His testimony did not go well.

XY apparently struggled to explain inconsistencies in his accounts and said that the pressures of living as an informant had affected his ability to distinguish between what was true and what wasn't.

Judge Penny Moreland ultimately rejected his allegations against the police and described him as "wholly unworthy of belief".

The attempt to have the prosecutions stopped failed.

On the surface, that might seem like the end of the story: a deeply unreliable criminal informant made allegations against his handlers, those allegations were investigated and rejected, and the prosecutions continued.

But there is a strange problem with that explanation.

Northumbria Police continued to maintain that XY had been an extremely useful source.

The force said he had provided intelligence that couldn't have been obtained through conventional policing. Then-Chief Constable Steve Ashman said information supplied by XY had allowed officers to intervene in situations, prevent offences and safeguard potential victims.

Police and Crime Commissioner Vera Baird also said she questioned the Chief Constable about the decision to use him. She was reportedly assured that XY's intelligence contributed to the investigation and subsequent prosecutions, couldn't have been obtained in another way and had enabled vulnerable women to be rescued sooner.

So XY somehow occupies two very different positions in the official story.

He was considered sufficiently unreliable that a Crown Court judge concluded his allegations against police couldn't be believed, yet sufficiently valuable as an intelligence source that Northumbria Police maintained his information helped them protect victims and advance one of their biggest exploitation investigations.

Those two things aren't necessarily incompatible. Criminal informants are routinely unreliable people, and intelligence can be independently corroborated even when the person supplying it can't generally be trusted.

But it raises an obvious question: what exactly did XY tell the police that was so valuable?

That becomes surprisingly difficult to establish from the public record.

There are fragments scattered across court reporting, statements from Northumbria Police and the Police and Crime Commissioner, a BBC investigation and the later serious case review into Operation Sanctuary. Together they establish a surprising amount about XY, but they don't seem to provide a straightforward reconstruction of exactly what intelligence he supplied, what police independently verified, or what actions directly resulted from it.

There is another uncomfortable detail buried in the later safeguarding material.

Some victims apparently raised concerns about whether XY himself could have abused them. They were told there was no evidence that he had, and the court similarly found no evidence that XY had committed sexual misconduct against complainants involved in the cases. There is therefore no basis for claiming that he abused Sanctuary victims.

But the fact that the question arose at all shows how unusual the arrangement was. Police had deliberately placed a convicted child rapist into an intelligence-gathering role around an investigation involving vulnerable women and children.

Former senior child-protection officer Jim Gamble later said he couldn't envisage circumstances in which he personally would have authorised paying someone convicted of rape to carry out this kind of work.

XY's allegations against Northumbria Police were investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. According to subsequent statements, the investigation found no misconduct and made no recommendations. The Office of Surveillance Commissioners also apparently found no problems with the operation.

And this is where the story becomes an interesting rabbit hole rather than simply a controversy about police informants.

There are a remarkable number of things about XY that remain difficult to piece together.

His identity remains protected. It isn't immediately clear exactly when Northumbria Police first recruited him, why he was originally recruited, how his relationship with his handlers developed over the years, what benefits he received in return for assisting them, or precisely what he was authorised to do during Operation Sanctuary.

It is also difficult to reconstruct what happened in March 2016 that caused such a complete breakdown between XY and his handler.

Then there is the IPCC investigation itself. Public statements say that XY's allegations were investigated and that no misconduct was found, but finding a detailed public account showing exactly what he alleged, how each allegation was investigated, what evidence was examined and why investigators rejected his version of events is considerably harder.

That leaves an unusual situation.

XY was a convicted child rapist with dozens of previous convictions who had apparently spent years secretly supplying intelligence to Northumbria Police. During one of the force's largest exploitation investigations, police paid him thousands of pounds because they believed he could reach people and places conventional policing couldn't. He continued getting into trouble while acting as an informant. His relationship with his handler then collapsed, he accused police of serious wrongdoing, threatened to approach the media, was relocated with his family under police protection and eventually appeared behind a screen in Crown Court.

A judge concluded that he was profoundly unreliable.

Yet Northumbria Police continued to insist that his intelligence had been important enough to help safeguard vulnerable women and contribute to prosecutions.

The obvious question isn't whether XY was telling the truth about everything. The available evidence gives no reason to assume that he was, and his allegations against police were rejected.

The more interesting question is what was happening during all those years before everything fell apart.

What intelligence did XY actually provide? How much of it was independently verified? What did police allow him to do to obtain it? How many investigations was he involved with before Operation Sanctuary? What sentencing benefits did he receive because of his cooperation? What exactly happened between him and his handler in 2016? And how did a convicted child rapist become valuable enough to Northumbria Police that they were prepared to accept the extraordinary risks involved in using him inside a sexual-exploitation investigation?

There may be perfectly legitimate answers to all of those questions.

The strange part is how difficult it is to assemble them into one coherent story.

Sources:

The Irish Times: Police used rapist as informer in Newcastle abuse investigation:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/crime-and-law/police-used-rapist-as-informer-in-newcastle-abuse-investigation-1.3181605

ITV News: Child rapist paid £10,000 by police to watch over girls at parties, court told:

https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2017-08-09/child-rapist-paid-10-000-by-police-to-watch-over-girls-at-parties-court-told

BBC Inside Out: Operation Sanctuary documentary transcript:

https://subsaga.com/bbc/news/inside-out-north-east-and-cumbria/2017/08/09/operation-sanctuary.html

The Independent: Operation Sanctuary: Police defend paying paedophile £10,000 to infiltrate child-sex gang:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/operation-sanctuary-paedophile-police-pay-child-sex-gang-ring-paid-money-ps10000-northumbria-a7885711.html

The Guardian: Eighteen people found guilty over Newcastle sex grooming network:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/09/newcastle-sex-grooming-network-operation-shelter

ITV News: Operation Shelter: "My brother wasn't part of grooming gang":

https://www.itv.com/news/tyne-tees/2017-09-08/operation-shelter-my-brother-wasnt-part-of-grooming-gang

Archived Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner: Comments on the Spicer report:

https://archive.northumbria-pcc.gov.uk/northumbria-police-crime-commissioner-comments-spicer-report/

UK Parliament, Hansard: Sexual Exploitation: Newcastle:

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2018-06-12/debates/56EDC679-22AB-4EDC-A077-E8CFB7A03591/SexualExploitationNewcastle

The RMP was carrying out an investigation known as Operation Cestro and wanted to question Special Forces personnel about allegations arising from operations in Afghanistan.

Then the meeting was terminated.

On its own, that probably doesn't sound particularly mysterious. Meetings end, investigations run into difficulties and disagreements happen between different parts of government. But more than a decade later, an independent public inquiry has been trying to establish something surprisingly difficult: who actually ended that meeting, why they did it, and whether it was deliberately terminated to obstruct a Royal Military Police investigation.

That question leads into a much bigger story.

Operation Cestro was being conducted by the Royal Military Police's Special Investigation Branch. The RMP wanted to interview members of UK Special Forces, but there appears to have been disagreement over what investigators were actually allowed to ask them.

Evidence examined by the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan has raised questions about whether restrictions had been placed on the RMP's ability to question Special Forces personnel. The inquiry has specifically investigated whether there was some kind of agreement or understanding governing the questions investigators could ask, who imposed those conditions and what happened when the RMP attempted to go beyond them.

This is where the apparently mundane story of an aborted meeting starts becoming much stranger.

The inquiry has had to reconstruct events from documents and testimony produced years later. It has examined whether the meeting was stopped because investigators were asking questions that UK Special Forces personnel believed they were not permitted to ask. More importantly, it has examined whether terminating the meeting could amount to an attempt to obstruct the investigation.

One of the people connected to these events is publicly identified only as "Soldier C".

When Soldier C was later approached by the inquiry, something unusual happened. Rather than simply answering all of the questions about what had occurred, Soldier C relied on the privilege against self-incrimination in relation to substantive questions.

That doesn't prove wrongdoing. The privilege exists for an important reason and invoking it should not automatically be interpreted as an admission of guilt.

But it makes the original question considerably more interesting.

Why did a meeting between military police investigators and Special Forces personnel end abruptly enough that, more than ten years later, a public inquiry is examining who stopped it and whether doing so interfered with an investigation?

And Cestro isn't an isolated story.

Following these events came Operation Northmoor, another Royal Military Police investigation concerning allegations arising from British operations in Afghanistan. Northmoor became enormous. Hundreds of allegations were examined and investigators accumulated a substantial amount of material.

Eventually investigators became interested in an internal UK Special Forces computer system that has subsequently been referred to publicly by the cipher "ITS1".

In 2015 the RMP sought access to it.

What happened to that system opens another rabbit hole entirely.

Investigators wanted ITS1 preserved so that its contents could be examined forensically. But when access was eventually obtained, they discovered that a secure deletion process had been operating on the system.

This wasn't simply someone dragging files into a recycle bin. Secure deletion software is intended to make deleted information much harder, or potentially impossible, to recover.

The timing immediately created questions.

The RMP had been investigating extremely serious allegations. Investigators had sought access to a Special Forces computer system. Preservation of potential evidence had become an issue. Yet data on that system had been securely deleted.

Internal discussions subsequently disclosed to the inquiry show that investigators themselves were concerned about what had happened.

Again, that doesn't automatically mean somebody deliberately destroyed evidence. Computer systems are routinely maintained, information is deleted for legitimate reasons and highly classified military networks have their own security procedures.

But then the story becomes stranger.

For years, the deletion of material from ITS1 was understood to have made at least some of the data effectively irretrievable.

Much later, during the Independent Inquiry, it emerged that backup drives existed.

Those drives reportedly contained terabytes of ITS1 data and had been stored at separate Special Forces locations.

That creates another remarkably simple question: if backups existed, why weren't they recovered and examined during the original Royal Military Police investigation?

The inquiry has consequently had to investigate not only what was deleted but who knew about the backups, where they were kept, what information they contain and why the RMP apparently did not obtain them at the time.

Seen separately, each part of the story could potentially have an innocent explanation.

A meeting between investigators and Special Forces personnel was terminated.

There was confusion or disagreement about what questions military police investigators were permitted to ask.

A computer system underwent secure deletion.

Investigators struggled to obtain material.

Backups existed elsewhere.

But put together, they form a strange sequence stretching across several investigations and more than a decade.

It is also unusually difficult to dismiss as internet conspiracy material because most of the rabbit hole now exists in official records.

The Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan has published witness statements, hearing transcripts, Royal Military Police documents, emails and other evidence. Names are sometimes replaced with ciphers because of the sensitivity of Special Forces operations, but the underlying investigation is very real and is happening publicly.

That also means the story is still developing.

There are reasonable explanations for at least some of what happened, and the inquiry has not established that every suspicious-looking event was deliberate obstruction. It is important not to jump from unanswered questions to conclusions that the evidence doesn't support.

But the unanswered questions themselves are fascinating.

Who terminated the February 2014 Cestro meeting?

What exactly caused it to be stopped?

Were Royal Military Police investigators operating under restrictions when questioning UK Special Forces personnel, and if so, who imposed them?

Why did Soldier C later invoke the privilege against self-incrimination?

What information disappeared from ITS1?

Who authorised its deletion?

Who knew that backups of the system existed?

Why did the Royal Military Police apparently fail to obtain those backups during Operation Northmoor?

And perhaps the most interesting question of all: what is actually contained in the recovered ITS1 data?

The strange thing about Operation Cestro is that the rabbit hole doesn't begin with an anonymous internet post, a leaked recording or an elaborate conspiracy theory.

It begins with something much more ordinary.

A meeting was held between the Royal Military Police and British Special Forces in February 2014.

Someone ended it.

More than twelve years later, an independent public inquiry is still trying to establish exactly why.

Sources:

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — Operation Cestro:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/operation-cestro/

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — ITS1 Server:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/phases/its1-server/

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — Evidence archive:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/documents/evidence/

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — Inquiry phases:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/phases/

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — 4 December 2023 ITS1 hearing:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/hearings/04-december-2023-open-hearings/

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — 5 December 2023 ITS1 hearing:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/hearings/05-december-2023-open-hearing/

Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan — FAQ and terms of the Inquiry:

https://www.iia.independent-inquiry.uk/faq/

The Inquiry's evidence archive is particularly worth exploring. It contains original Royal Military Police material from Operation Northmoor, including policy files, data-recovery records, meeting minutes, witness statements, emails and the Operation Northmoor Executive Summary.

I've recently gone down a bit of a rabbit hole with this case and I'm surprised it doesn't seem to get talked about more often, especially considering there have been some pretty significant developments recently.

Kenneth George Jones was 18 when he disappeared from Glenrothes, Fife, in November 1998.

On the evening of 2 November, Kenneth was reportedly at his uncle's house, which was only a few doors away from his own home in Ancrum Court. He spent part of the evening playing computer games and apparently seemed completely normal.

At around 10:30pm he returned home.

By the following morning, he was gone.

As far as I can find, there has never been a confirmed sighting or contact from Kenneth since.

What initially interested me was how little there seems to be explaining why he disappeared. He apparently hadn't behaved as though he was preparing to leave permanently and his family initially thought he might have gone jogging.

There were possible sightings afterwards, but none seem to have led anywhere.

Someone resembling Kenneth was apparently seen sleeping rough near Ladybank. A former school friend believed they had seen him in a pool hall in Kirkcaldy. There was also a hitchhiker picked up near Falkland who was initially thought to possibly be Kenneth, but police eventually tracked the man down and established that it wasn't him.

His photograph was even put on milk cartons as part of the attempt to find him.

Nothing.

Then I found out about another strange coincidence.

On 3 November 2013, exactly 15 years after Kenneth was discovered missing, another young man from Glenrothes, 23-year-old Allan Bryant, disappeared.

Allan has never been found either.

As far as I'm aware, police have never established any connection between the two cases, so I don't want to imply there is one. It could simply be an extremely strange coincidence. But two young men disappearing from the same Scottish town exactly 15 years apart is obviously something that catches your attention.

What really sent me down the rabbit hole, though, is what has happened recently.

Police began reviewing Kenneth's case again and it was eventually passed to the Major Investigation Team. Apparently more than 1,000 inquiries have been carried out as part of the review.

Then, in February 2026, detectives returned to Kenneth's former home in Ancrum Court.

And in April they returned again and searched the garden.

According to reporting in The Courier, investigators had identified an anomaly underneath the patio and excavated it.

Think about how unusual that is.

A teenager disappears in 1998 without a confirmed trace, and almost 28 years later detectives are using modern technology and physically digging underneath the patio of the house where he lived.

There is another detail I hadn't heard about before either.

A woman may have seen Kenneth at a bus stop on Roxburgh Road, only a short distance from his home, on the morning he disappeared. Detectives reportedly interviewed this witness for more than two hours in late 2025.

I haven't been able to establish whether police now consider that sighting credible, but if it was genuinely Kenneth, it could obviously be important in establishing what happened after he left home.

I keep coming back to a few questions:

Why did Kenneth apparently leave without telling anyone?

Where was he actually going?

Was the bus-stop sighting really him?

Why has that particular sighting become relevant again after nearly three decades?

And perhaps most interestingly, what caused investigators to return to his former house and eventually excavate beneath the patio?

I want to be careful here because Kenneth's relatives and people who have lived at the property are real people, and none of this is evidence that any particular person was involved. I don't think internet speculation accusing people of crimes helps anyone.

But purely as an unsolved disappearance, I find this case fascinating.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere near the amount of discussion about Kenneth that you see with many other British missing-person cases, despite the fact that Police Scotland's Major Investigation Team is apparently still actively trying to work out what happened.

Kenneth would be 46 today.

Has anyone here researched this case in depth or come across contemporary newspaper coverage from 1998/99?

I'm particularly interested in whether there's more information about his movements that night, the possible Roxburgh Road sighting, or what originally led police to believe he may have left Glenrothes.

I feel like there is a much deeper rabbit hole here than what's currently available online.

I received another email from SFRS today. They said they are currently “reviewing plans for the next phase of the recruitment campaign and arrangements for progressing the next batch of candidates through the selection process.”

They haven't confirmed a Batch 3 allocation or given a date yet, but said updates will be shared with candidates as they become available.

So it looks like the next batch is still being planned/organised rather than Batch 3 having already been fully contacted.

Thought I'd update this post for anyone else who's still waiting. If anyone gets a Batch 3 email or application questions, please update us here.

I registered for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service Wholetime Firefighter recruitment campaign that opened in March 2026.

The last update I received said that Batch 2 had been formed and that candidates selected for Batch 3 would be contacted around August. They also confirmed that all candidates will be considered for batches.

It’s now 17 August 2026 and I haven't received a Batch 3 update yet.

Has anyone from the March 2026 SFRS recruitment campaign heard anything about Batch 3 yet, or been contacted to say they've been allocated to it?

I know the process involves over 4,000 registrations and several batches, so I'm not worried about the wait, I'm mainly interested in whether Batch 3 has started moving yet.

Thanks!

https://preview.redd.it/x64r9z3stqjh1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=02bbf2822805214a6ae091de6961f79f120feb06

VIDEO LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwnso2dOBBI

A Scientology whistleblower told Times journalist Tom Ball that the church’s Edinburgh branch had children as young as thirteen working there during school hours. The church denied the allegation. Tom went undercover to investigate.

Guest: Tom Ball, news reporter, The Times
Host: Manveen Rana
Producer: Sophie McNulty

Clips: Apostate Alex - YouTube.
Photo: Ian Rutherford for The Times.

For people familiar with Severance, which of these real-world religious organizations do you think has the closest similarities to Lumon Industries in terms of organizational structure, hierarchy, leadership, internal culture, rules, bureaucracy, and expectations of members?

I’m not suggesting that any of these organizations is literally equivalent to Lumon, I’m interested in comparing organizational characteristics and culture.

1. Church of Scientology

2. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

3. Jehovah’s Witnesses (including the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania)

4. Seventh-day Adventist Church

5. Plymouth Brethren Christian Church

Which would you choose, and why?

If you think another religious organization is a closer comparison, feel free to name it.

The Tampa Bay Times is reporting that a newly formed political committee, Clearwater Strong PC, has been supporting Clearwater City Council candidate Jared Leone with campaign mailers.

According to the Times, Clearwater Strong received $70,100 after forming last month. Nearly all of its funding came from another political committee, Citizens for Law Order and Ethics. The Times traced that funding through several other Florida political committees and reported that three of them had received roughly $89,000 from nine people with confirmed ties to the Church of Scientology around the time Clearwater Strong was formed.

One donor identified by the Times, businessman and major Scientology donor Tom Cummins, reportedly contributed a total of $50,000 to the three committees three days before Clearwater Strong filed its organizational paperwork.

Leone says he has no affiliation with Scientology or Clearwater Strong and described attempts to connect him to the church as a political attack.

His opponent, Bianca Latvala, believes the activity is connected to her opposition to Scientology's efforts to acquire part of South Garden Avenue in downtown Clearwater.

The Church of Scientology denies involvement. Spokesperson Sarah Heller told the Times that the church is not endorsing or supporting any candidate and did not direct or coordinate its parishioners' political donations. She said individual Scientologists are free to participate politically in their personal capacities.

Clearwater Strong consultant Christian Ulvert also disputes the suggested connection, saying the committee itself has not accepted donations from Scientologists.

The Tampa Bay Times says it independently confirmed both the financial transactions and the nine donors' ties to Scientology.

Source: Tampa Bay Times — “Committee supporting Clearwater candidate has ties to Scientology” by Colbi Edmonds, published August 14, 2026 and updated August 15.

I feel a bit stupid asking this, but I'm genuinely panicking and could use some advice.

I was scrolling through Instagram Stories today and got an advert from the LDS Church. I've seen their ads quite a few times before and, out of curiosity, I clicked on it because I'm interested in learning about different religions and high-control religious groups.

It already had my first name filled in, so I pressed continue. On the next part, my name, address and phone number were already filled in as well. I pressed continue because I genuinely thought it was going to take me to a website where I could read more information.

Instead, I suddenly got a confirmation saying that missionaries would contact me/visit me and asking if I wanted to know more about my visit.

I absolutely wasn't intending to arrange a missionary visit to my house. This happened at around 12:44 pm today and I'm now worried that I've actually sent my details directly to local missionaries.

Does anyone here know what normally happens after submitting one of these forms? Will they contact me first before coming to my house? And is there any way I can cancel the request before anyone visits?

I'm in Scotland, UK, if that makes any difference.

Thanks I know I've been an idiot and should have read everything more carefully.