The UK’s West Midlands Police used fictitious evidence to justify its advice to ban Israeli fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team from attending a match in Birmingham last month, the force’s chief admitted to a parliamentary committee Monday, as MPs grilled police brass on the basis of their controversial decision.

The Aston Villa soccer club announced in October that no Maccabi fans would be allowed at a November match following a police assessment that classified the event as “high risk” and suggested banning Israeli fans from the stadium.

In the report presented to the club that suggested banning Israeli fans, police presented information about a 2023 match between Maccabi and West Ham, which the report said was the Israeli club’s “last appearance on UK soil to date.”

“The most recent match Maccabi played in the UK was against West Ham in the Europa Conference League on Nov 9, 2023,” the report read.

However, no such match was played, and Maccabi has never faced off against the East London club.

When grilled about the fact that this fictitious match was included in his force’s report, Chief Constable Craig Guildford admitted to the Home Affairs Committee that such an event “didn’t happen.”

“West Ham have never played Tel Aviv. On that day, West Ham played Olympiacos of Greece and beat them one-nil,” Guilford told the parliamentary committee.

Guilford said that the fictitious match ended up in the report “due to a social media post,” but insisted it did not impact his overall decision.

In addition to the fake match, police cited  “violent clashes and hate crime offenses” during a Europa League match in Amsterdam between Maccabi and local team Ajax last November.

The report claimed that Israeli fans threw “innocent members of the public into the river,” that 500-600 of them “intentionally targeted Muslim communities” and that the violence forced the deployment of 5,000 police officers.

Guildford admitted to MPs that he “conflated” information about the Amsterdam........

© The Times of Israel