A social media campaign to free Aafia Siddiqui spiked before Malik Akram attacked the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas.
Michael Tuiz, writing in Fox News said that the researchers uncovered a coordinated spike in Twitter activity sympathetic to the convicted terrorist "Lady Al Qaeda" Aafia Siddiqui.
In the five months ahead of the synagogue attack, pro-Siddiqui tweets surged, according to new research released by the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM) and conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI).
They were attributed to both "bot-like activity and a network of influencers amplifying anti-Semitic content."
NCRI's report, based on publicly available Twitter data, spotted a blip of activity sympathetic to Siddiqui in September and then a massive spike in January. Many of the accounts, including the 20 most active ones, self-identified as Pakistani, according to the researchers.
Twitter said Wednesday morning that it was investigating the information uncovered in the report, reported Tuiz.
"The well-coordinated online and offline solidarity campaign for Aafia Siddiqui, a raving anti-Semite herself, indulged in anti-Semitic tropes and predictably inflamed supporters," Elan Carr, a former US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism and member of CAM's advisory council, said in a statement first provided to Fox News.
The data, which NCRI said it collected from publicly available information, shows "the cause Akram identified as a key motive for his attack had been promoted by a US-based nonprofit organization and self-identified Pakistani Twitter accounts in the months before the attack," the report read.
While there was some evidence of bot activity, the researchers noted that the campaign included real people and also preceded a real-world demonstration calling for Siddiqui's release -- a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) rally outside the prison, said Tuiz.
At the rally, a speaker railed against "Zionist judges" and another CAIR leader lambasted "Zionist synagogues" in November.
Siddiqui is serving an 86-year prison sentence for shooting at US service members. She had been arrested in connection with an alleged Al Qaeda plot before she grabbed a soldier's M4 and opened fire on her interrogators. She missed.
David Grantham, a law enforcement professional with the Tarrant County Sheriff's Office and author of "Consequences: An Intelligence Officer's War," said that police can also learn lessons from the case to improve their ability to thwart future attacks.
"If we see these trends in the future, anything like this, we need to consider that there could be violent action associated with this organized online activity," he told Fox News Digital. "So that's the most basic fundamental thing that law enforcement will look at from this report."
( With inputs from ANI )
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