EU DisinfoLab found out about a massive disinformation campaign. A new investigation has revealed that, a dead professor and numerous defunct organizations were resurrected and used alongside at least 750 fake media outlets in a vast 15-year global disinformation campaign.

The man whose identity was stolen was regarded as one of the founding fathers of international human rights law, who died aged 92 in 2006.

“It is the largest network we have exposed,” said Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinfoLab, which undertook the investigation and published an extensive report on the disinformation campaign.

EU DisinfoLab said that the network was designed primarily to “discredit Pakistan internationally” and influence decision-making at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the European Parliament. The DisinfoLab also partially exposed the network last year but now says that the operation is much larger and more resilient than it first suspected.

The EU DisinfoLab researchers, who are based in Brussels, believe the network’s purpose is to disseminate propaganda against India’s neighbour and rival Pakistan. Both countries have long sought to control the narrative against the other.

The investigations from last year and this year show that  a man called Ankit Srivastava at the centre of the entire global operation that was uncovered. More than 400 domain names have been bought through Mr Srivastava’s private email address or through email addresses belonging to his organizations, the EU DisinfoLab investigations found. One of the most important findings of the open-source investigation was establishing direct links between the Srivastava Group (SG) and at least 10 UN-accredited NGOs, along with several others, which were used to promote Indian interests and criticize Pakistan internationally.

The investigation shows that the operation led by Srivastava Group began in late 2005, a few months after the UNHRC was founded in its current form. One particular NGO which caught the eye of the researchers was the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace (CSOP). The CSOP was founded in the 1930s and won UN-accreditation in 1975 but became inactive later in the 1970s.

The investigation found that a former chairman of the CSOP – Prof Louis B Sohn, one of the 20th Century’s leading international law scholars and a Harvard Law faculty member for 39 years, was listed under the name Louis Shon as a CSOP participant at the UNHRC session in 2007 and at a separate event in Washington DC in 2011.

The listings shocked the researchers because Prof Sohn died in 2006.

Then, there is a case of the mysterious SG-owned tech firm Aglaya. Its website has been inaccessible since at least February this year but in the past the company has advertised products for “hacking/spy tools” and “information warfare services”.

Aglaya’s marketing brochure mentioned the ability to “hamper country-level reputations” and described some of its services as “Cyber Nukes”. In a 2017 interview with Forbes magazine, a man called Ankur Srivastava claimed that he “only sold to Indian intelligence agencies”. It is unclear what relation, if any, he has to Ankit Srivastava.

A third Srivastava appears to be Dr. Pramila Srivastava, chairperson of the group and mother of Ankit Srivastava. Dr. Harshindar Kaur, a pediatrician from the Indian state of Punjab, told the EU DisinfoLab researchers that in 2009 she had been invited to the UNHRC in Geneva to give a lecture on female foeticide when she was threatened by a woman called Dr. P Srivastava, who claimed to be a “very senior government official from India”.