The biker gang ‘securing’ deadly Gaza aid sites

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. Police! From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

0:59Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:12Gunfire in Gaza. But this isn't combat. This is a humanitarian aid site that's supposed to feed starving civilians enduring a famine. It appears someone's been shot. An American voice celebrates.

1:33Claiming, without providing evidence, that Hamas was stealing substantial amounts of aid, the United States and Israel backed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as the solution. They started delivering aid in late May, but since then, in scenes of chaos and gunfire, according to the UN, more than 1 ,200 Palestinian children, women and men seeking food have been killed near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's sites. People should never be met with bullets when they're just seeking to feed their kids. Now we've discovered that running security at the aid sites were members of an anti-Islamic, gun-toting American biker gang.

2:17They're called Infidels Motorcycle Club, or Infidels MC for short. Seven of them were in senior positions overseeing armed security teams at these deadly sites in Gaza. Putting the Infidels Biker Club in charge of delivering humanitarian aid in Gaza is like putting the KKK in charge of delivering humanitarian aid in Sudan. We wanted to know, how did that happen? Who decided to recruit the leaders of an anti-Islamic biker gang to oversee humanitarian aid for more than 2 million civilians? And can we find out through open source intelligence, who exactly are they?

2:59I'm Andy Verity, Investigations Correspondent for the BBC, and this is the documentary from BBC Trending.

3:09By the time the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF for short, was announced in May this year, Israel had been blocking aid agencies from entering Gaza for two months. But it launched only four sites, compared to around 400, which the UN used to run, all over Gaza. Three of them are close to Gaza's southern border. The GHF said its aim wasn't political, but simply to feed Palestinians. But to its critics, like the UN's disaster relief coordinator, Tom Fletcher, it was not the answer. We can save hundreds of thousands of survivors. We have rigorous mechanisms to ensure our aid gets to civilians and not to Hamas.

3:50But Israel denies us access. It exposes thousands of people to harm. It restricts aid to only one part of Gaza, while leaving other dire needs unmet.

4:04To feed their families, aid seekers from nearby towns had to walk long distances to reach the aid sites. There, they'd queue for hours along an open-air tunnel between high fences. At a given moment, the gates to the sites would be opened, forcing thousands of aid seekers into a desperate race to get the food, which was simply piled on the ground, a race the elderly, young or disabled were bound to lose. Right next to some sites were Israel's defence forces, the IDF. Almost as soon as it started operating, the UN says, aid seekers started dying near GHF sites, some from stampedes, but the majority of them from being shot.

4:52A bullet struck him. He fell to the ground. I kept calling, Abdullah, Abdullah. Abdullah was taking his last breath. Despite the heavy gunfire, I rushed through it to reach him. He'd been shot, and within 10 minutes, he passed away. On the 2nd of August at 8am, Moaz says his friend Abdullah was shot just in front of a bridge that leads to the entrance to a GHF-8 site. He was there because his family needed flour. Moaz and another Palestinian, both witnesses to Abdullah's killing, spoke to our colleagues at BBC Eye. They pointed the team to the exact location where he was shot. The Eye team geolocated it to 500 metres from GHF-8 site 4.

5:40A video later uploaded onto social media shows hundreds of Palestinians under fire. They're taking cover behind a sandbank. The whole area is under Israeli military control.

5:55BBCI obtained the original video which shows the time, date and location. It was filmed 50 minutes after Abdullah was shot, just 135 metres from the spot where he died. BBCI's analysis suggests the gunfire came from the direction of the GHF8 site. I tried to get to others to help me carry him But everyone was running towards the aid point to get food For Abdullah's father, Diyah, his death has left him devastated I sacrificed my eldest son so he could feed his siblings His father and his mother That's how I feel Of course it's an awful feeling As if I was the one who killed my son as if I was the one who sent him to his death.

6:46But we desperately needed that aid. We needed that aid.

6:54BBCI asked the IDF specifically about the death of Abdullah. It didn't respond, but told us it does not deliberately fire at innocent civilians. GHF's lawyers said its security contractors don't deliberately fire at civilians either and that they're not aware of any credibly documented instance of their ever doing so. No one has been shot dead at a GHS site, the lawyers said, nor within sight of one. But Abdullah was one of 18 people killed that day near the aid site, according to data from ACLED, a group that monitors conflict and is funded, among others, by the UN, the US and European governments.

7:36So who is using live ammunition on unarmed aid seekers? The UN has said most of the killings appear to have been carried out by the Israeli security forces. In late June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that IDF officers and soldiers told them they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites, even when no threat was present. and that shooting unarmed civilians had been normalised. The IDF denies these killings. It recently told the BBC that it's not aware of hundreds of fatalities caused by its forces at distribution points. It says these figures are inflated and false.

8:15But we know it wasn't the IDF guarding the sites. Holding the guns there were subcontractors running security.

8:24The following month, one of them went on the record and blew the whistle, telling the BBC he'd resigned from UG Solutions after witnessing war crimes. A few days later, a small team at the BBC, Tom Beale, Will Dargreen and I, began investigating GHF and its contractors and soon after, Will got an intriguing tip from a contact. He didn't want to be named for this story but we had a really wide-ranging chat. He just dropped in casually that they'd hired a biker gang called the Infidels and we all thought, well, we've got to check this out. It just sounded quite wild. I literally just Googled the name Infidel's Motorcycle Club and it came up.

9:02There were two different ones. One was specifically a veteran's one and there was another one which had like kind of a flashy website and they listed places that they were actually working and they sort of hinted that they were available for contract work. Founded in 2006 by US military contractors in the Iraq War, the Infidel's Motorcycle Club's members are mostly retired from the US military. Their website shows hundreds of them riding chopper-style motorbikes in formation on American highways.

9:36On archived pages from the Infidels MC website, we also found the skull logo of the violent Marvel comic book character Punisher, a symbol appropriated by white supremacist groups, inscribed with kafir in Arabic script, which translates as non-believer or infidel. More recently, on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, members are seen posing with Crusader tattoos, machine guns and MAGA hats. Most of them adopted nicknames in the military to keep anonymous in radio communications, also known as call signs, which they still use, from Saint to Hardway to Recoil. They seem to have cleaned up their social media, but some material could still be found.

10:21We found a Reuters article from 2015 saying that one of the chapters of the Infidels MC had held a pig roast during Ramadan. We couldn't actually find the flyer itself, so I started looking through tweets from 2015, which some of them were talking about this event and they linked to pages which were now archived or deleted. So I then managed to go back through the archives and find those stories, and from there I managed to find two different snippets of the flyer, which when pieced together, we could see that it said that the pig roast was actually held in defiance of the Islamic holiday of Ramadan.

10:55And then on the bottom half of the flyer, we could also see there was a picture of a woman with her burka torn off, exposing her chest. And on Infidels MC's Facebook page, we found anti-Islamic hate speech. Some comments are too offensive for us to repeat on air. Other comments have a violent undertone, like, filling my magazine to the max would not be the first time we were at odds with Muslims. We quoted them to Edward Ahmed Mitchell of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. There's no doubt that this biker gang, based on what we're seeing, all of the hallmarks of their behaviour matches up with anti-Muslim hate groups we've seen for decades, calling themselves infidels, embarrassing, humiliating Muslim women, opposing Ramadan.

11:37All of this is typical anti-Muslim bigotry. I got hold of an internal letter addressed to two of the leaders of UG Solutions' mission in Gaza. One of them is Johnny Taz Mulford. Was he in the Infidels? We started searching him up online. Sure enough, he was. Here's Will and Tom again. I started looking through company filings to see if there are any companies attached to the Infidels MC. and sure enough there was one in Florida and it actually had Johnny Malford's name on it as the registered agent which means that he was in charge of all correspondence for the company behind the Infidels MC. Meanwhile I was looking at his social media and on his Facebook account in the name of Johnny Taz Malford among the pictures there there was a group picture of Johnny Malford wearing an Infidels MC jacket surrounded by others in similar jackets looking frankly like a group of bikers.

12:35Tom also found another website after searching his name for a company based in Florida offering fishing and diving boat trips. It had photos of Taz. As we looked at these photographs, there was one where he's kneeling down, he's got a harpoon, there's two gas bottles that you use for diving, and he's got his top off. And you can see, tattooed across his chest, the number 1095 with a cross each end of the figure.

13:041095 was the year Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade. with a notorious speech. An accurate record of the speech doesn't survive, but he's claimed to have condemned Muslims as a vile race while calling for the recapture of Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslims and Jews were slaughtered. Edward Ahmed Mitchell explains more. When you see anti-Muslim bigots today celebrating 1095, celebrating the Crusades, they are celebrating the whole-scale massacre of Muslims. If you have dedicated an entire biker club to hating Islam, it is no surprise that you would then unleash violence upon Palestinians asking for food in Gaza.

13:43So this is all predictable, and it's absolutely insane. Putting the Infidels Biker Club in charge of delivering humanitarian aid in Gaza is like putting the KKK in charge of delivering humanitarian aid in Sudan.

13:59So far, we had identified one Infidels Biker Gang member working for UGS, Johnny Taz Mulford, but we'd also heard that he'd recruited lots of bikers from the Infidels gang to join him. Lured to Gaza by pay that started at$980 a day, including expenses, rising to$1 ,580 a day for team leaders at GHF's safe distribution sites. We wanted to find out, were the bikers in charge? You're listening to the documentary with BBC Trending from the BBC World Service. Coming up, we identify more members of the infidels and expose their anti-Muslim agenda.

14:40We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover, in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. Police! From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, The Darkest Web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.

15:24I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:58law should be replaced by the law of power. The interview from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

16:12You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Andy Verity. Soon after learning about Taz Malford, we found a Facebook post under his name inviting anyone with combat experience who could still shoot, move and communicate to apply to work in Gaza. Then we found out something more about him. Here's Tom again. One of the documents we discovered online is called the Army Procurement Fraud Advisors Update. It's from April 2007. And in it, it said that Johnny Malford had been punished for conspiracy to commit bribery, theft and making false statements to military authorities.

16:49It suggests he hasn't got the best track record. We contacted Johnny Malford via email to ask him about his punishment. According to the document Tom discovered, he was debarred from the military, but he didn't respond.

17:05So UG Solutions had appointed a former sergeant in the US Army who'd been punished for bribery to its disaster relief operation in Gaza. Why? What did he bring to the job? Well, we know they needed to recruit people fast. One contractor said he got a call on May 13th, and four days later he was in Gaza. And Johnny Malford knew lots of US military veterans from his biker gang.

17:34We still didn't know quite how senior in the gang Johnny Malford was, or whether he'd recruited other gang members to the Gaza mission. Through LinkedIn, I got hold of another contractor who'd worked on it and told me everything the whistleblower had said about UGS and GHF was 100 % true. But we needed more evidence. I sent a write-a-reply email to Infidel's Motorcycle Club to confirm if Johnny Mulford was running it. Care to comment? I fully expected zilch in response. But the next morning, I got a surprise. There in my inbox was an unexpected email from Johnny Mulford. He'd responded to my email to Infidel's MC, forwarding it to other gang members, saying, don't reply.

18:18But he hadn't removed the BBC from the chain before he clicked Reply All, inadvertently disclosing email addresses and names of fellow Infidels MC members, some of whom were working in Gaza. It also indicated he was in charge, telling his fellow bikers what to do. Tom and Will set off to find out more. One of the email addresses was for Larry J. Rod Jarrett. I found a Facebook account pretty easily, and I managed to find him tagged by someone else on Facebook. because there was some of him at some form of military ceremony, but there was also one of him in a leather jacket, which matched up with some of the other photos we've seen of the Infidels, and on his leather jacket was the name J-Rod.

18:59That confirmed that the Larry Jarrett seated in this email was the same Larry J-Rod Jarrett in the Infidels gang. So the other guy that we found from the email was called Bill Sieber, but we didn't have his name. All we had was a generic treasurer's email address. So I stuck that into some databases and found that it had actually been used by an individual to sign up for Cash App, which is an American banking app. And he'd used the nickname Saint. And then another online source said that the Infidels MC gang's treasure was called Marvin Saint Seba. So we were getting somewhere. And then I found a corporate record for a guy called Marvin Seba, who had a company called Crusader 1095 Inc.

19:43And then finally, a source told us that Saint's name was Bill, Siba, and that he was on the ground in Gaza. So far, we'd identified four gang members at UGS in Gaza, but we had days of frustration trying to find evidence of more and failing. Then, another breakthrough. I was given the names of all the people on a signal chat for UGS security in Gaza. For us, that chat group was like a goldmine. Within minutes, we found more Infidel's members at UG Solutions in Gaza. By matching up names or emails with social media sites from Instagram to LinkedIn to TikTok, we identified 10 members of Infidel's MC who'd been recruited to work with Taz Mulford.

20:24There may well be more. One ex-contractor thought at least 40 of about 320 on the mission were in the biker gang. Some were openly boasting about their mission in Gaza on their social media profiles. One of the names on the Signal chat group was Josh Greybeard Miller, who Tom discovered owned a firm selling alt-right clothes and hats. I found this T-shirt for sale on the website. It shows a skeleton surfing, but it's actually a caricature of what seems to be an American soldier. They've got a bulletproof vest on with a US flag on it. They've also got a beer in their hand and wearing a baseball cap.

21:03And seemingly behind the skeleton is high-rise buildings in Gaza being blown up. And written on it are,

21:14Our information showed Josh Miller was leading an armed security team at GHS aid sites. Our jaws kept dropping. Then Will made an astonishing find. I was scrolling through the company's Facebook page and went down a little bit further and found something that we imagined might have been out there the whole time. It was a picture of a group of soldiers or contractors out in Gaza and they were holding a banner which said, Make Gaza Great Again. And then not only that, but we realised there was a logo on the banner and it was actually for this company that was selling the T-shirts. Josh Miller, sporting 1095 and Crusader tattoos, was using his job wielding guns in Gaza where starving Muslim children, women and men were being trampled or shot to promote T-shirts and baseball caps.

22:05When we put our findings to Josh Miller in an email, he didn't respond to our request for comment. From May to August, Johnny Mulford was the country team leader of the UG Solutions mission. Six other Infidels bikers we identified were in senior roles, including leading arms security teams. All of those we've named were sent detailed write-of-reply letters and offered the chance to defend themselves in interview. None took up the offer. However, UGS told us... We do not screen for personal hobbies or affiliations unrelated to job performance or security standards. Every team member undergoes comprehensive background checks and only qualified, vetted individuals are deployed on UGSolutions operations.