THE VICTIM OF A RACIST assault who was stripped and bloodied by a group of youths has been accused of crimes, both online and on the day of the attack, despite there being no evidence to support these claims.

The incident on the evening of 19 July saw the innocent man assaulted in the Parkhill Road area of Kilnamanagh in Tallaght, south-west Dublin.

The victim, an Indian man aged in his 40s, was stripped of his pants and underwear by the gang during the vicious attack.

A witness said that the group had taken the man’s phone and money and “left him for dead”.

Garda sources said they’re satisfied the man was not behaving inappropriately and was wrongly targeted. There is no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the victim.

Despite this, posts on social media that echo unfounded claims about the victim have been shared widely.

“A foreigner allegedly exposed himself to children and the locals acted swiftly.. FAFO”, reads a caption to a video that shows a man in a car shouting abuse at the man, which was posted by the Facebook account Off-Grid Ireland.

“FAFO” stands for “fuck around, find out”, and is usually used to refer to people who swiftly suffer from the consequences of their own actions (though the saying does not apply to the assault victim in this case).

Off-Grid Ireland operates multiple social media accounts that regularly post racist conspiracy theories, and false claims posted to these accounts have been previously fact-checked by The Journal.

The latest video and its caption have been viewed more than 1.2 million times since being posted on 19 July, according to statistics on Facebook.

The claim made in the post, that the “foreigner” had “exposed himself to children” is baseless, and typical of the type of false accusations that have been made about other non-white people on anti-migrant social media accounts.

The Journal has debunked multiple false claims that non-Irish people have attempted to kidnap children since the start of the year.  

Gardaí have appealed for witnesses to the assault.

With reporting from Eoghan Dalton and Niall O’Connor.

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