A series of mysterious fires and explosions at UK car dealerships selling luxury 4x4s are being ascribed to a secret government anti-terror operation gone awry. “The official story was originally gas explosions, then, when the phenomena started spreading all over the country, the government tried to invent a fake terror threat by claiming that these were arson attacks being carried out by militant extreme left anti-poverty groups – when, in reality, it was all down to their own supposed anti-terror operations,” top freelance investigative reporter Billy Gripestone has told The Sleaze. “Now they’ve slapped a D-notice on the whole business in an attempt to stop any more of these attacks being reported. The fact is that they are desperately trying to cover up a massive military cock up which has seen these car dealerships mistakenly identified as legitimate targets by a top secret new automated weapons system which has gone rogue!” According to the journalist, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been experimenting with autonomous weapons systems which, once set to their mission, will continue to operate without human intervention until they are destroyed. “It was simply a logical extension of their unmanned Reaper drone operations in places like Afghanistan,” Gripestone explained. “The top brass feared that the remote human operators of those Reapers could undermine missions by questioning the legitimacy of their targets – how many wedding parties can one drone pilot massacre on the pretext that the groom’s brother is an Al Qeada operative before they start to doubt their superiors?” The answer, Gripestone contends, was to equip the drones with their own artificial intelligence, capable of identifying and destroying targets without question.

“This is why the UK government opposed a ban on the development of so called ‘killer robots’ at a recent UN conference,” the writer claimed. “For them, such devices are a Godsend – if they can perfect them then they can institute massive cuts in defence spending. Who needs, armies, expensive fighter jets or warships, when you can instead deploy a handful of unstoppable killer war machines instead?” Unfortunately, a number of the MoD’s experimental autonomous drones have somehow escaped into ‘the wild’ and are now causing havoc across the UK. “As far as I can ascertain, it happened whilst they were being trialled on a live firing range in North Wales,” Gripestone revealed. “The problem was that they were smarter than the military personnel who were meant to be in charge of the trials and, their artificial intelligence believing that they were on a ‘real’ mission, the drones just went off on their own!”

But just what are these autonomous anti-terror drones now attacking car dealerships? Gripestone believes that it is all down to their target identification programming. “They were designed to operate against ISIS in Syria and Iraq,” he explained. “Theatres where the terrorists’ favoured means of transportation and attack is a 4×4 with guns mounted on them – the RAF has already expended millions of pounds worth of munitions blowing a couple of these up, the autonomous Reapers would represent a cheaper option. Clearly, they’ve been programmed to identify such vehicles as legitimate targets.” The investigative journalist also believes the drones have been programmed to try and destroy the terrorists’ weapon systems at source by blowing up any dealership it finds selling such vehicles. “Once they’ve destroyed every 4×4 dealership in the UK, the drones will start going after individual vehicles,” says Gripestone. “There will be blood on the streets as all those bankers’ ‘Chelsea tractors’ are targeted. I shudder to think of the carnage that will be wreaked on the school runs in middle class districts. God knows how the government will manage to cover that up – no number of D-notices will be able to keep massacred kiddies off of the front pages!”

However, the 4×4 dealerships don’t represent the drones’ first wave of attacks, with the journalist claiming that there had already been a flurry of attacks against their ‘primary’ targets. “Even before the government started trying to cover up the car dealership attacks, there had been reports from across the West Midlands and South London of corner shops and Halal butchers being burned down or blown up,” Gripestone claimed. “All of them were owned by Muslims! On top of that, several Asian men were blown up in their cars as they drove along public roads. There have been no official statements on the causes of any of these incidents. Mind you, they’ve barely been reported, although I don’t think that has anything to do with an official cover up, rather than the fact that the media simply don’t care if Mr Khan and his shop get blown away! It just isn’t considrred newsworthy. Obviously, if it was Asian men blowing up white shopkeepers, that would be different!”

The reporter believes that the drones were programmed to target and kill specific individuals identified as active terrorists, but instead hit a number of perfectly innocent Muslim businessmen in the UK. “There are two possibilities here,” he opined. “Either the data the MoD provided the drones with to identify these targets was so vague that they just went around shooting at any Asian-looking man with a beard and wearing a kufi cap, or, for test purposes, they just scanned in a load of photos of random Muslim men, none of whom were actually terrorists.” For its part, the MoD has denied Gripestone’s claims, dismissing them as ‘ludicrous’. “The idea that a number of military drones could operate independently for this length of time is quite ridiculous,” a Ministry spokesperson told The Sleaze. “”Just from a logistical perspective it is an impossibility – they would surely have run out of fuel by now, for one thing. Besides, if such a thing occurred – which obviously it hasn’t – we’d simply use fighter aircraft to intercept and destroy the errant drones.” Nevertheless, when pushed, the spokesperson did concede that not only were some military drones solar powered and could therefore stay aloft indefinitely, but that, due to spending cuts, the RAF didn’t have the resources to actually put its fighters into the air. Even if any were actually operational. “Unfortunately, they’ve already used this year’s operational budget bombing ISIS pick up trucks in Syria,” the spokesperson told us. “So we’ll just have to wait until next year to intercept these drones – which don’t exist, of course. Hopefully, before then the non-existent drones will have used up all of their ammunition and ceased to be a threat.”