Businesses near Washington’s Comet Pizza, the restaurant where an armed man showed up to ‘self-investigate’ fake news stories, also recieved violent threats

In the days before an armed man stormed into a local pizza restaurant looking to “self-investigate” fake news reports, several nearby businesses had been receiving what they called “disturbing” and “graphic” threats.

“Sometimes they would call 10-15 times an hour saying: ‘We are going to kill you!’” said Bradley Graham, the co-owner of Politics and Prose, a popular bookstore near Comet Ping Pong, the restaurant at the center of the fake news stories that alleged a child sex ring involving the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“They were disgusting, grotesque and violent death threats,” added his co-owner, Lissa Muscatine, who also received personal threats on her Twitter account.

The calls unsettled the business owners, as the fake news stories mushroomed into a rightwing internet conspiracy – one of a host fabricated reports that proliferated this election season. They grew wary of strange visitors who showed up at their stores taking pictures and asking about secret tunnels. They wondered if the threats would grow into something bigger, something dangerous.

Then on Sunday afternoon, police say 28-year-old Edgar Welch of Durham, North Carolina, showed up in Comet wielding an assault rifle, shooting it three times. According to criminal charges filed late Monday, Welch told police that he “read online that Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there”. There were no reported injuries and Welch “surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant”, police said.

Nearby business owners expressed relief on Monday that it wasn’t something worse.

Abdel Hammad, the owner of Besta Pizza, located three doors from Comet, found his store dragged into the mess when internet conspiracies drew a connection to the vague resemblance between his restaurant’s logo and a symbol apparently used by pedophiles. Hammad, an Egyptian immigrant who barely knows Comet’s owners and did not support Clinton, said he has received constant, alarming calls for three weeks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abdel Hammad, owner of Besta Pizza, said he received death threats at work. Photograph: Les Carpenter/The Guardian

“They were threatening to blow our heads off and blow our store up and blow (up) our entire organization,” Hammad said.

At one point, Hammad grew so angry with the calls that he challenged one of them to “show up and show his face”.

“He hung up, it was all talk,” Hammad said. “Nobody showed up.”

Then he paused.

“But now someone has,” he said.

He said he reported several of the calls to the police but said “nothing happened”. This even after an incident several days ago in which his manager, Ibrahima Diallo, confronted two women who had come to the counter asking to see the tunnels. When Diallo tried to chase them out, he said they slammed the door on his hand, breaking it. Diallo was able to get the plate number off the women’s car but when he gave it to police he said he was told: “It’s a civil matter, there’s nothing we can do.”

DC police spokeswoman Margarita Mikhaylova said they had “not received reports of specific threats” from businesses neighboring Comet Ping Pong.

She added that officers had advised store employees in the area to report threats.

“We want to ensure the community that their safety is our priority as we have committed additional police resources to that area,” she wrote in an email on Monday.

Comet Ping Pong employees said they experienced a similar string of threats in the weeks leading up to the shooting. The fake news story first emerged in the days before the election when campaign manager John Podesta’s emails were hacked and and published on WikiLeaks. Online conspiracy theorists found emails to Comet’s owner James Alefantis about potential fundraisers. Some online posters scoured Comet’s Facebook and Instagram pages pulling photos of children posted by their parents and suggested that Comet was actually part of a secret child sex ring run by Democrats. They tracked down signs promoting events at the restaurant and said the artwork depicted child sex scenes. They parsed the WikiLeaks emails picking out words like “hot dog” and “cheese” and said they were possible codes being used by pedophiles to set up orgies.

Because John Podesta’s brother Tony is an occasional customer at the popular north-west DC pizzeria, direct connections were made and the fake allegations dubbed “Pizzagate” blew up on Reddit and Facebook. The threats followed. First to Comet, then Besta Pizza and then Politics and Prose, which Muscatine helped buy after working as a speechwriter for Hilary Clinton – an association that allowed some to allege that underground sex trafficking tunnels were connecting the businesses.

On Monday both Graham and Muscatine, former Washington Post writers, were forced to look reporters in the eye and say with a straight face that no tunnels existed beneath their store. “Our business is not connected in any physical way with any of the other stores,” Graham said wearily. They had reported the death threats to their district council representative and wondered why it had taken a man with a gun to finally draw interest from the police.

Outside the store window sat two police cars. In a late-day meeting Monday with business owners who expressed their fears of other violence, police officials promised to increase their presence, Graham said. They and the mayor’s representatives also told the store owners they would look more at this new phenomenon of fake news and see how to better react.

“Eventually, fake news becomes real,” Graham said.