Matt Murphy
BBC Verify senior journalist

We're bringing a close to this live page, on what has been a busy day for our team.

We continued our coverage of the Manchester synagogue attack. After police named the suspect last night as Jihad al-Shamie, BBC Verify got to work searching for his online footprint. We have been combing through social media profiles associated with him over the course of the day.

Israeli forces intercepted the final vessel of the Global Sumud Flotilla early this morning. Our open-source team has tracked some of the detained vessels to an Israeli naval base at Ashdod.

And with Dame Sarah Mullally named earlier as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, data shows women now make up about a third of all Church of England clergy.

Our coverage of the aftermath of the Manchester synagogue attack will continue on our main live page and over the weekend.

BBC Verify Live will be back on Monday morning.

Richard Irvine-Brown and Matt Murphy
BBC Verify

As we reported earlier, all 42 boats of the Global Sumud Flotilla have now been intercepted by Israel and those aboard have been detained.

Using ship tracking website MarineTraffic we know that five of the vessels have been taken to the Ashdod Naval Base, on the Israeli coast. But we can’t say for sure where those detained by Israeli forces have been taken.

A video that first appeared online a little after 23:00 BST last night claims to show Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir addressing people taken from those boats, calling them “terrorists”.

Several people sharing the video claim it was filmed at Ashdod, and while it looks very similar to an area of the port used to keep shipping containers we can’t be certain. We are also comparing faces of people in the video with images from the flotilla, including testimonies recorded before the journey toward Gaza.

But in a separate video Ben-Gvir claimed that he was at the Ketziot Prison in the Negev Desert. Addressing the camera, he said that “those same sailing people” were also at the prison. He added that those detained were receiving “terrorist conditions.”

While the scene looks similar to public photos of Ketziot Prison - white walls, blue doors and pipes overhead - no prisoners appear in the footage, and, again, we can’t be certain of the location.

BBC Verify has asked the Israeli foreign ministry whether it plans to return the vessels to their owners and how long those detained will be held. Citizens of more than 40 countries were taking part in the flotilla.

Image source, Instagram

Police have named Jihad al-Shamie as the Heaton Park synagogue attack suspect and are treating it as a terror incident.

BBC Verify’s Merlyn Thomas has been looking at what more we know about him.

Aidan McNamee
BBC Verify data journalist

Dame Sarah Mullally has made history by becoming the first female Archbishop of Canterbury – and the latest figures show women now make up a record share of the Church of England’s clergy that she now leads.

As of June 2025, just over a third of the Church of England’s nearly 18,000 priests are women – 6,595 in total. In 2013 when her predecessor Justin Welby became archbishop it was only about a quarter.

But it’s not just the gender balance that’s shifted. The number of clergy in the Church has fallen by around 13% since 2012 – down from 20,650 to 17,885. This has been driven largely by a decline in male clergy, with roughly 4,000 fewer men serving since then, despite 1,300 more women joining the priesthood over the same period.

These figures include clergy at every level - deacons, priests and bishops. The Church of England told us that of 33 out of its 108 bishops are women.

Tamara Kovacevic
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, PA Media

We’ve been listening to Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s speech to his party’s autumn conference where he pledged to tax the assets of the wealthiest 1% of people, saying this would reduce inequality.

So, how wealthy do you need to be to fall into this 1% tier?

According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), external, the wealthiest 1% of households in Great Britain had a total net wealth of at least £3,121,500 each in the period between April 2020 and March 2022.

Property and private pensions made up the largest share of those households’ wealth.

The ONS said the wealthiest 1% of households held 10% of all household wealth in Great Britain which was the same as the proportion held by the least wealthy 50% of households combined.

Polanski didn’t say how many people fall in this category or how much he would tax them.

Christine Jeavans
BBC Verify senior journalist

North Manchester and the surrounding area has a relatively high proportion of Jewish people, according to census data, external.

Across England and Wales, only 0.5% of people who answered the 2021 census gave their religion as Jewish.

But in some neighbourhoods around the Heaton Park synagogue the proportion is more than 50%.

Looking on a wider scale, as you can see in this map, the religious Jewish population is centred in only a few local authorities.

Hertsmere borough, just to the north-west of London, has the highest proportion with 17% of people. Barnet in north-west London has 14.5% giving their religion as Jewish.

Outside of Greater London, 5.5% of people in Bury (the Greater Manchester local authority just north of the Heaton Park synagogue) said they were Jewish, along with 3.8% of people in neighbouring Salford.

Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Telegram

We’ve seen videos being posted today that appear to show another attack on a Russian oil refinery involving what looks like an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or drone.

We’ve located these videos to the city of Orsk, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan, which is well over 1,000km (620 miles) from Ukraine.

Two of the videos gave us a clear view of a large object with a twin tail flying towards the refinery.

Alexander Lord, lead analyst at the Sibylline Intelligence consultancy, told us it looked like a Ukrainian-made Antonov An-196 drone. The BBC’s Kyiv bureau also said it appears to be that type.

The videos were filmed from a distance so it isn’t possible to see the extent of any damage to the refinery.

We were able to match some of the refinery’s structures such as a red and white chimney with imagery on Google Earth and Street View. Weather forecasts confirmed clear skies for that part of Russia.

While Ukraine has not confirmed it carried out this attack it has regularly targeted Russia’s energy infrastructure in recent months.

BBC Verify has been investigating the impact of these strikes which you can read more about here.

Richard Irvine-Brown, Matt Murphy and Sebastian Vandermeersch
BBC Verify

As we reported earlier, the last of the 42 Global Sumud Flotilla vessels has been intercepted.

Some of those vessels were seen arriving at Ashdod Naval Base in Israel on Thursday.

Some of the flotilla’s boats were transmitting AIS data, which meant they could be tracked on the MarineTraffic website.

The Estrella Y Manuel, for example, could be seen splitting away from the others on Wednesday night roughly 50 nautical miles from Gaza and changing course for Ashdod where it has been moored since Thursday evening.

As of Friday morning, AIS data put the last known positions of five of the flotilla at the port - the Estrella Y Manuel, the Adara, the Capten Nikos, the Ohwayla and the Seulle.

A statement from the flotilla on Thursday said hundreds of their people had been taken aboard the MSC Johannesburg, a Liberia-flagged container ship, seen 26 nautical miles from Ashdod at the time.

This morning it was harboured at the north jetty of Ashdod port.

BBC Verify has asked the Israel Defense Forces whether it plans to return the vessels to their owners and how long those detained will be held.

Update 14:21: MSC, which operates the Johannesburg, told BBC Verify that the flotilla organiser's statement is "incorrect", adding the Johannesburg "is a container ship not a naval vessel". We have approached the Global Sumud Flotilla for a reponse.

Phil Leake
BBC Verify data journalist

The number of antisemitic hate crimes in Greater Manchester increased at the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict in October 2023 but has since returned to lower levels, according to monthly data collected by the police.

Greater Manchester Police have figures dating back to March 2020 on the number of hate crimes recorded against different religions, external.

They show a spike in hate crimes against Jewish people in late 2023, with 85 reported in October and 68 in November.

This compares with an average of 12 per month between March 2020 and September 2023.

Incidents remained high in early 2024 with 34 hate crimes per month on average in the first half of the year, before falling back to levels seen before the conflict.

Daniel Wainwright
BBC Verify senior data journalist

With today's announcement that Dame Sarah Mullally is the new Archbishop of Canterbury, I've been looking at the data on Christianity in England and Wales.

Fewer than half of people described themselves as “Christian” in the latest Census, the first time that has happened, external.

A total of 27.5 million people, 46.2% of the population, were recorded as Christian in 2021, down 13.1 points from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011. This includes all forms of Christianity.

However, the Office for National Statistics said that “Christian” was still the most common answer, with “No religion” coming second. The question on religion was voluntary.

Figures on attendance come from the Church of England’s (C of E) own surveys, which suggested congregations had grown for four years in a row, external following years of decline. And it is still not back to where it was before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Preliminary data from the C of E’s annual Statistics for Mission, suggested there were about 1.02 million regular worshippers in 2024, up 1.2 per cent on 2023, with about 701,000 who attend across the week.

Matt Murphy
BBC Verify senior journalist

Germany's Munich airport has reopened after several drone sightings forced it to close and cancel more than a dozen flights on Thursday night.

It’s the latest in a series of recent drone incursions across Europe. Last week Denmark blamed a "professional actor" for an incident that shut Copenhagen airport for several hours.

It’s unclear who is behind these events, but Dr Ulrike Franke from the European Council on Foreign Affairs told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that the Munich incident could have been caused by "a capable state actor" or a "hobbyist".

"We've had instances of larger drones in recent days and weeks - and in some instances mothership drones, larger drones which send out smaller drones - flying near critical infrastructure," she said.

"These are instances where we can be certain these aren't hobbyists... most likely a state, most likely Russia.

“In the Munich case at this point we don't have enough information about the type of drones, and how they moved, to give us information as to who was flying them."

Franke urged airports to equip themselves with anti-drone technology to combat the surge in incursions to airspace. She suggested that to date, officials haven't "seen the economic need" to invest in the technology.

Image source, EPA

Richard Irvine-Brown
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, Global Sumud Flotilla

The last of the 42 boats sailing in the Global Sumud Flotilla which had been heading towards Gaza has been intercepted by Israeli forces.

Since Wednesday night we’ve watched almost all of the boats being boarded by the Israeli military as it was live streamed on the flotilla’s YouTube channel along with videos on their Instagram account.

By yesterday evening only one boat, the Marinette - which had been sailing a long way behind the others - had not been intercepted.

At 07:56 BST, according to the timestamp on the Marinette’s livestream, one passenger held up a piece of paper to the camera reading: “We see a ship!”

At 08:29 BST a dinghy full of armed troops wearing tactical gear pulled alongside the Marinette, with a much larger military vessel visible in the background. This tallies with the flotilla’s claim the boat was intercepted at 10:29 local time.

The latest data on the Marinette, via the flotilla’s tracking website, put it 43 nautical miles (80km) from the Gaza coast at 08:07 - shortly before it was boarded.

Shayan Sardarizadeh, Ghoncheh Habibiazad and Paul Brown
BBC Verify

Image source, Pinterest

After police named the suspect in the Manchester synagogue attack last night, BBC Verify got to work searching for his online footprint.

We found records of an address in Greater Manchester which listed Jihad al-Shamie and three other individuals with the same second name.

Through social network analysis, were able to find online profiles for the suspect's brother and father, the latter of which had a photo of a man matching Jihad al-Shamie's description cradling a baby. The photo was captioned was "welcome grandson".

Face matching tools then led us to two other images online, one from a LinkedIn profile and from a site for English tutors.

Kumar Malhotra
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Reuters

Drone activity in the vicinity of Munich airport led to its temporary closure late on Thursday, according to German authorities.

The flight tracking site, FlightRadar24, is one tool we can use to see the impact of disruption to commercial air traffic.

It shows delays to departures at Munich starting around 21:00 local time (20:00 BST) and continuing for the next hour or so, with arriving flights being diverted to other German cities including Stuttgart. A TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon flew on to Vienna in neighbouring Austria.

Flights begin to arrive on schedule at Munich starting from 04:30 local time (03:30 BST) this morning.

There’s been no confirmation of where the drones came from but this incident follows recent disruption at other airports in Denmark and Norway in the last fortnight.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning from BBC Verify Live.

We’re investigating new reports of drone activity at a European airport after flights were disrupted at Munich last night. Germany’s second biggest airport had to halt operations because of the unexplained drones leading to the cancellation of 17 flights.

We’re looking for any footage that might shed more light on the latest incident and what flight-tracking data can tell us about the disruption.

Following yesterday’s attack at a synagogue in Manchester members of our team worked until the early hours of this morning checking and verifying the suspect’s online presence.

We’ll explain here how we checked a range of internet profiles to learn more about Jihad Al-Shamie, the man police have named as carrying out the attack.

And with the announcement that the Bishop of London, Dame Sarah Mullally, is to be the new Archbishop of Canterbury our data team has been looking into the stats on how many people are attending Church of England services.