The neonatal unit where Lucy Letby worked suffered an outbreak of bacteria lethal to babies, a leaked risk report shows.

In August 2023, Letby was convicted of the murders of seven newborns and the attempted murders of six other infants. A retrial in July also found her guilty of the attempted murder of another child.

Since the conviction, numerous scientists, statisticians and doctors have expressed their concern about the evidence presented to the jury regarding shift patterns, medical conclusions and the standard of care at the Countess of Chester.

It has now emerged that at the time when infant mortality rates spiked at the Countess of Chester hospital between 2015 and 2016 – the years in which Letby was convicted of killing the infants – the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa had colonised taps in the nurseries of the neonatal unit, including intensive care.

Pseudomonas is known to be lethal to vulnerable babies. In 2012, a premature baby died and 12 others needed treatment at Southmead Hospital in Bristol after an outbreak of a water-borne bacterium.

Three premature babies also died after contracting the bug at the Royal Jubilee Maternity Hospital in Belfast January 2012. In that case, sink taps were found to be the source of infection. A baby had died from the same infection six weeks earlier in Derry.

Bacteria ‘can be lethal in newborns’

David Livermore, professor of Medical Microbiology, at the University of East Anglia said: “Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an environmental organism that likes moisture.

“It can be lethal in newborns, especially premature ones, who lack a properly developed immune system.

“From mid-2015 to mid-2016 there were around 17 infant deaths at the Countess of Chester unit.

“We are asked to believe that this comprised two superimposed clusters, one of seven murders by Lucy Letby, and one where, to quote the crown prosecution expert, they died for the usual problems why small babies die: haemorrhage, infection, congenital problems.

“It is simpler to believe that we are looking at a single spike of fatal infections in a chaotic unit.”

The risk report leaked to The Telegraph, showed that the Countess of Chester hospital had been dealing with Pseudomonas since at least May 2015 when there were fears about transferring babies from nearby Arrowe Park Hospital.

The risk score was reduced in August 2015, when there had been no infections in neonates, but in December 2015, a tap in intensive care tested positive for the bug and had to be replaced.

In the same month a tap in another baby ward also tested positive but the report warned that there was no capacity to replace it, so filters were fitted instead. The report said the filters would remain in place “until we get the all clear”.

Notes show that by the middle of February 2016, staff had still not received this confirmation.

The risk of the bacteria was designated as high and the unit brought in controls to prevent the spread, including limiting visitors and treating all babies “as if they had a severe infection”.

The risk register said that although estate staff were monitoring the taps and testing the water supply frequently it was: “Only as good as the last test and does not guarantee the patient’s/parents/visitors or staff safety.”

The US Centre for Disease Control’s Prevention and Response branch told The Telegraph that Pseudomonas was “an urgent threat” to babies in intensive care, and warned symptoms of an infection could sometimes be subtle, and cause or exacerbate other conditions.

“In our experience mortality rates during Pseudomonas aeruginosa outbreaks can be high,” a spokesman said.

“Neonatal intensive care unit patients often have defects in their immune system and are often subject to large amounts of very invasive care which make them very susceptible to infections with healthcare pathogens and also, when infected, at high risk for adverse outcomes including death and severe infection.

“As neonates have little capacity to compensate for additional stresses, infection can cause other problems in these patients that are not directly related to the infection.”

One mother whose baby was at the unit in 2016 said that she had been told that there was an outbreak of a virus on the ward, and her son was the only infant not infected. It is not known if she was referring to the Pseudomonas bacterial incident or a separate viral outbreak.

Speaking to the Mail’s Trial of Lucy Letby podcast, the anonymous mother said: “A matron came upstairs to me while I was an inpatient for two weeks and said that there was a virus on the unit and all the babies have got to stay in the rooms that they’re in and we’re not accepting any new babies.

“She seemed very panicked and it left me thinking at the time ‘oh my gosh, what is going on’?

“(My son) was the only one that apparently didn’t have this virus. They didn’t want him getting it because he was so small, he was still on the oxygen at the time.”

During Letby’s trial it emerged that there had been major problems with plumbing in the hospital and on one occasion human waste or sewage entered the neonatal intensive care room from the drains of a ward above.

However the bacterial infection problems in the unit were never mentioned, neither during the trial nor in a report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) who investigated the high mortality rate at the unit in 2017.

Prof Livermore added: “Although the Pseudomonas colonisation was known at the time of the RCPCH report it is not mentioned. Why, especially given the Belfast deaths? Were they told?

“Did they speak to the infection control team, given that infection was such a plausible cause of clustered deaths? These are yet more questions that the Thirlwall Inquiry needs to address.”

The Thirlwall Inquiry has been set up to look at problems at the Countess of Chester during the period where Letby was convicted of murdering babies.

The Telegraph has asked the RCPCH whether it was informed about the Pseudomonas outbreak while it was investigating the high mortality rates, but it said it could not comment while the inquiry was ongoing.

A spokesman for the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said “Due to the ongoing police investigations and the pending public inquiry, it would not be appropriate to answer or provide advice on the questions asked at this time.”

A “control freak with a savage temper” who caused a fatal accident by pulling the handbrake while on the motorway has been jailed for more than seven years.

Gary Toomey, 37, and his former partner Victoria Bell, 34, were having an argument as they returned from a festival late at night on Sept 24 2021.

Despite the car travelling at 70mph along the M62 near Liverpool, Toomey, who was in the passenger seat, grabbed hold of the handbrake and pulled it up, causing the car to spin out of control and smash into the central reservation.

Ms Bell managed to get free of the wreckage, but was hit and killed by another vehicle.

Toomey, of Hollin Hey Road in Bolton, later told police that a “feeling had come over him”.

He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and on Thursday was sentenced to prison for seven years and four months at Liverpool Crown Court.

The couple had lived together at Ms Bell’s home in Huddersfield before the relationship broke down.

However, they still occasionally saw each other and on the night of the fatal accident were returning from a festival in Liverpool.

‘Life ruined forever’

Toomey, an HGV driver, told officers that Ms Bell had said she did not want to see him again and that he had begun to shout at her, before pulling up the handbrake.

The Crown Prosecution Service said Toomey had pulled the brake “in temper”, with “tragic ramifications”.

Investigators found that the oncoming vehicle had no time to react to avoid Ms Bell, with poor lighting in the vicinity of the Clock Face Colliery Country Park making it “really hard to see until the last moment”.

In a victim impact statement read out in court, Ms Bell’s mother said: “Your actions have ruined my life forever.”

She described him as a “control freak with a savage temper”.

Toomey was also disqualified from driving.

Det Sgt Kurt Timpson, lead investigating officer from Merseyside Police Serious Collision Investigation Unit, said: “Toomey has destroyed a close family relationship by his shocking behaviour that night.

“Any person travelling at speed in a moving vehicle on a motorway would instinctively know that to pull a handbrake would be highly likely to cause very serious injury or death, to them and other road users. It is simply beyond belief.”

He added: “Merseyside Police will not tolerate any form of domestic abuse or controlling and coercive behaviour.

“We will deal robustly with every report and work with partner agencies to prevent and reduce this type of crime.”

Before the fire and fury in Southport, there was a name – Ali Al-Shakati.

Al-Shakati has never existed, we now know, but that didn’t stop an obscure, Russian-linked fake news outlet from naming him as a 17-year-old supposedly Muslim asylum seeker responsible for the murder of three schoolgirls in the town on Monday.

Channel3 Now, a website that masquerades as a legitimate American news outlet but acts as an “aggregator” for real news stories as well as fake viral claims, published the claim on the back of speculation which appeared to have started on X, formerly known as Twitter.

What had begun as a trickle then became a flood, sending the conspiracy theory pouring out through social media anew, where the name was boosted by thousands of other Russia-linked accounts before being repeated by authentic Russian state media, which cited Channel3 Now in its reporting.

The claim was meanwhile picked up by far-Right figures such as Tommy Robinson – founder of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, which played a major role in instigating the riots in Southport and elsewhere this week – and notorious influencer Andrew Tate, whose posts about Al-Shakati garnered millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes. 

By Tuesday, the conspiracy had gone mainstream, propelled by the likes of entrepreneur Duncan Bannatyne who claimed in a post online that “maybe [Tommy Robinson] was right all along” about the risks posed by Muslim immigrants, before later deleting the remarks. And as news of the attacker’s supposed identity spread, anger grew, sparking the riots that rocked the Merseyside town that evening before spreading out across the country.

Police were later forced to confirm that the suspect’s supposed name was false. On Thursday, the real suspect was named in court as Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents in 2006.

Exactly how this little known website found itself at the centre of the chain of events is “very, very messy and uncertain”, says Stephen Hutchings, a Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester and the principle investigator at (Mis)Translating Deceit, an anti-disinformation project. 

There are many like it, who post hundreds of stories a day with a pro-Russian or anti-western slant intended to sow confusion and destabilise society in Britain and elsewhere, Hutchings explains, and why this one in particular gained such traction following Monday’s attack in Merseyside may never be fully understood. 

But what is known, he says, is that Channel3 Now belongs to a complex web of modern day information warfare that stretches from the grief-stricken streets of Southport all the way back to the Russian city of Izhevsk, some 800 miles east of Moscow – and an obscure YouTube channel seemingly set up by amateur car rally enthusiasts more than a decade ago.

The channel’s first videos, aired in 2012, were posted with Russian titles and generic thumbnails, and showed drag racers gleefully thrashing their cars about in a snowy Izhevsk.

Like so many accounts set up in the early 2010s, when YouTube took off as a major online streaming platform, the channel went dead for several years after its owners presumably grew bored with it. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, it became active again and was renamed Funny Hours, Hutchings says. Rather than its original car-fan content, however, it was posting English-language videos about Pakistan upon its reboot.

Disinformation expert Dr Marc Owen Jones, a professor at Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, said this week that the sudden change in content published by the account suggested it had been “hijacked and repurposed” – as opposed to it being formally part of a Russian disinformation operation from the off.

Hutchings agrees, and believes that the takeover was carried out by Russian-linked actors suspected of being behind Channel3 Now as a way to shield their identities. In 2016, three years before the YouTube account’s possible “hijacking” appeared to take place, a Facebook page used to share its content was set up with the same name: Funny Hours. 

The videos uploaded were bizarre. They included one focused on a tiger being beaten to death, and a match report on Manchester City’s women’s team, according to a report by MailOnline.

But a couple of years ago, things shifted. The organisation appeared to have been rebranded as Channel3 Now and the videos it shared began to resemble those of a professional news channel. Last year, channel3now.com was registered as a web domain.

Content shared on the site in the run-up to the stabbings in Southport included news pieces that appeared to have been ripped straight from British and American newswires, but also stranger stories too: a very brief obituary for American singer Shifty Shellshock, who died last month, and a piece accusing NFL player Xavien Howard of “having four women pregnant at the same time”. 

Hutchings says that there is a simple explanation for the bizarre online output of both the YouTube channel and the news website. While “there is clear evidence that it does have some kind of link to Russia, the Russian state outsources a lot of its online activities to semi autonomous operations which it pays to do its work, but which are given free reign,” he explains.

“These operations feel the need to justify their often quite generous payment and rely on the same tactics that other online figures do, namely clickbait,” Hutchings says. “And a good old-fashioned conspiracy theory drives a lot of traction towards pro-Russian or anti-Western disinformation, especially one that taps into popular prejudices.” 

This site is one of several “proxies” and hardly the most successful, says Hutchings, adding the Kremlin has long been “busily involved” in stoking dissent in Britain and elsewhere through such projects. 

More renowned examples include the Voice of Europe website, which “has been empirically traced to specific Russian figures”. Sites such as these often amplify posts by authentic anti-immigrant or conspiracy theory accounts, says Hutchings, rather than spitting out their own original lies.

Channel3 Now, for its part, was first registered under a Lithuanian domain in 2023 and it has been reported that the site’s IP address is owned by two Pakistani nationals – further evidence that “while it would be foolish to deny that Russia is likely stoking some of the tension here, it’s more tricky to claim that the state is doing so in a targeted, closely coordinated manner”, Hutchings says.

What is clear following the riots on the streets of Britain this week is the scale of its impact. An X account used to share Channel 3Now’s articles has just 3,000 followers – yet on the same platform, posts “speculating that the [Southport] attacker was Muslim, a migrant, refugee or foreigner” generated at least 27 million impressions, according to Jones.

While the fake story undoubtedly reached huge numbers of real people, the startlingly high number of impressions likely came about because “many of Channel3 Now’s followers will not be real people but actually bots who reshare things that seem to be gaining traction online”, explains Hutchings. 

A deepdive into the organisation’s website indicates it is attempting to pass itself off as a normal media outlet, seemingly in pursuit of credibility. Some of the articles published on Channel3 Now appear to be pulled from mainstream news sites and reputable, internationally significant agencies such as the Associated Press. Others are “repackaged using AI” in what Hutchings describes as an “authenticating device” designed to make the site seem trustworthy. 

On Monday, it appeared to have named the Southport attacker as Ali Al-Shakati after the name was cited by commentator Bernie Spofforth, whose X account @Artemisfornow regularly shares conspiracy theory material and has a large following. Channel3 Now picked up the story just two minutes after Spofforth’s own post, which has now been deleted without further explanation.

While he doesn’t know with “one hundred percent certainty” whether the Ali Al-Shakati story was picked up by an automated programme or by a person, it “probably originated with someone real” who saw the viral potential in the story and its divisive nature, says Hutchings.

Yet who it could be is impossible to tell. The site has a single named author, called James Lawley, whose LinkedIn account states that he owns a gardening company in Nova Scotia, Canada. The site is routed through a Massachusetts-based service that anonymises website ownership details. 

A reverse-search using Lawley’s image turns up no results except his LinkedIn page, and his listed company, A Cut Above Halifax, has no other mentions online – all of which suggests he may in fact not be a real person. 

Further complicating efforts to understand Channel3 Now and its inner workings, the site’s YouTube channel mysteriously disappeared from the internet after the Southport attacker’s supposed identity was disproven.

Meanwhile, the organisation’s website released a statement apologising for its “misleading information” which “did not meet our standards of reliability and integrity”. 

This is only another “authentication device”, Hutchings says. “If they see themselves as having any future beyond this, then they need to give the impression that they made an innocent mistake and called it out for what it is.”

Certainly, as the threat of renewed violence looms large over Britain this weekend amid plans by the far-Right to hold rallies in dozens of cities across the country, the questions about Channel3 Now and its role in our information ecosystem remain pertinent.

As recent days have shown, a fake news site and its conspiracy theories need not really be convincing all of the time to sow chaos. It only takes a single spark to start a fire.