For much of the time since the charge was laid, Mark Mazzetti, Graham Bowley, Malachy Browne and I have been looking into two broad and related questions: Why are the police confident that Mr. Chaudhry is a fabulist and what did Mr. Chaudhry actually do? Our review of everything we could find about Mr. Chaudhry, who lives in Burlington, Ontario, did not rule out the possibility that he went to Syria within a narrow window of a few weeks. Ultimately, we could not find any independent corroboration of Mr. Chaudhry’s participation in the atrocities he claims to have committed in the “Caliphate” podcast. The group I was part of looked into Mr. Chaudhry’s claims, not what the podcast’s journalists did with them. In an editors’ note attached to the “Caliphate” episodes, they said that the podcast was “not sufficiently rigorous” and that its episodes featuring Mr. Chaudhry did not meet The Times’s standards.

Source: New York Times December 18, 2020 22:07 UTC