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For three days before police identified the Portuguese man who apparently killed two Brown University undergraduates and an MIT professor, a certain squalid sector of social media was astir with one question: Where is Mustapha Kharbouch? Kharbouch, a Brown undergraduate and Palestinian activist, was floated as a culprit by @0hour1, an anonymous X account with 270,400 followers. Others claimed that Kharbouch was “allegedly, possibly … a suspect” (whatever that means), and amateur forensic podiatrists reported a “97.8% gait match” between Kharbouch and the killer. The Agence France-Presse has a roundup of prominent figures who amplified suspicion of Kharbouch, including the podcaster Tim Pool and the financier Bill Ackman. Brown took down, without explanation, webpages that mentioned Kharbouch, and some said that deletion looked awfully suspicious.
Where was he? Presumably he was busy interviewing libel lawyers, and calculating how much of his Brown tuition could be paid off by suing those who accused him of killing his classmates. Some of his tormentors have gone to their websites and taken down, without explanation, their accusations. Some might say that deletion also looks awfully suspicious, the evidence of a bad conscience and possibly good legal advice.
Other speculation was less damaging, but still wrong. The Morning Meeting’s Mark Halperin relayed a rumor that the killer had targeted Ella Cook, a conservative student and one of the victims. And The Jerusalem Post indicated that Iran might have taken out the MIT physicist, Nuno Loureiro, although now it appears that that was a Portuguese-on-Portuguese murder without geopolitical significance.
