A professional “swatter” — someone who pranks armed police into raiding the homes of innocent people — has claimed responsibility for placing a fake 911 call that led an officer to kill a man in Wichita.

Police were lured to the home of Andrew Finch, 28, on Thursday evening by a caller who falsely claimed to be inside with hostages and a gun.

Knowing nothing of the report, Finch went to the door as officers surrounded his home and was fatally shot on his porch.

In tweets and interviews, a man known online as “Swautistic” said he had placed the 911 call — which in his view was a routine hoax gone badly wrong.

“Bomb threats are more fun and cooler than swats in my opinion and I should have just stuck to that,” Swautistic told reporter Brian Krebs on Friday. “But I began making $ doing some swat requests.”

Several hours later, Los Angeles police arrested a 25-year-old named Tyler Barriss in connection with Finch’s death. According to KABC, he had been arrested two years earlier for making hoax bomb threats to their TV station.

[ A police officer fatally shot a man while responding to an emergency call now called a ‘swatting’ prank ]

Police have not confirmed that Barriss and Swautistic are the same person, or said who called them to the house, or why. But local reports suggest that Finch — a father of two — may have been randomly caught up in a feud between two videogamers who obtained his address.

The two unnamed gamers got into an argument over a match of Call of Duty on Thursday, according to the Wichita Eagle. Screenshots of the spat show that one of them dared the other to swat him — and for some reason gave out Finch’s address.

Swatting usually makes the news when police are tricked into raiding the home of celebrity — like Justin Bieber in 2012 or Lil Wayne in 2015. But it’s lately become a way for people to escalate online disputes into the real world — punishing a rival with a surprise visit from a SWAT team.

Swautistic, as his screen name suggests, billed himself as something of a specialist.

“According to him, he’s put his shingle out there as someone who can be hired to make these false reports,” said Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter who now investigates digital security issues. “It seems like he got some kind of pleasure from doing it.”

This may be how the aggrieved Call of Duty player came to enlist Swautistic’s services.

[ Professor who tweeted, ‘All I want for Christmas is white genocide,’ resigns after year of threats ]

“I was minding my own business at the library,” a man claiming to be Swautistic told the YouTube channel DramaAlert. “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey dude, this f—ing r—-d just gave me his address and he thinks nothing is going to happen. You want to prove him wrong?’ I said, ‘Sure, I love swatting kids who think that nothing’s going to happen.’ ”

On Thursday evening, a man phoned Wichita City Hall and ended up speaking with a 911 dispatcher. He said he had accidentally shot his father in the head during an argument and was now pointing a handgun at his mother and brother.

He threatened to set the house on fire, and then asked the operator: “Do you have my address correct?”

Police said the man continued to call 911 — even after they’d arrived at the address.

About an hour after sunset, officers surrounded the two-story house on McCormick Street where Finch was at home with his mother and at least two other people — none of them hostages.

“I had seen the red and blue light flashing in my window,” Lisa Finch told the Eagle. “I heard my son scream, I got up and then I heard a shot … They didn’t call the ambulance until he was dead.”

Finch was one of nearly 1,000 people shot and killed by U.S. police in 2017.

Without naming him, police later said that a man emerged from the house and was repeatedly ordered to put his hands up. An officer thought he saw the man reach for a weapon, and opened fire.

But the man had no weapon, and police soon realized there were no victims in the house.

At a news conference, a deputy police chief said the officer who fired his gun had been placed on paid leave, and he blamed Finch’s death on “the actions of a prankster.”

Lisa Finch questioned how police could have been so easily duped. Her son didn’t even play video games, she told the Eagle. “He has better things to do with his time.”

As reporters crowded around Finch’s blood-spattered porch on Thursday, @SWAuTistic wrote to 18,000 Twitter followers:

“Those tweets indicate that Swautistic is a serial swatter,” Krebs wrote on his website. He had claimed responsibility not just for Wichita — but for false bomb hoaxes at the Federal Communications Commission, a convention center in Dallas and a high school in Panama City, Fla.

A man Krebs believes to be Swautistic contacted him on Twitter on Friday morning through an alternate Twitter account. “I didn’t believe him at first,” Krebs told The Post. “But he was able to prove he was the swatter.”

Krebs asked Swautistic if he felt bad about Finch’s death.

“Of course I do,” he replied. But he blamed the shooting on police and the Call of Duty player who had given him Finch’s address — “taunting me to swat.”

“People will eventually . . . tell me to turn myself in or something,” he wrote. “I can’t do that; though I know its morally right. I’m too scared admittedly.”

“All so stupid,” he wrote by way of reflection. “This whole thing.”

A few hours after Krebs interviewed Swautistic on Friday, Los Angeles police arrested Tyler R. Barriss. Wichita police confirmed that he is a suspect in the case, though spokesman Paul Cruz said he didn’t know how or if Barriss is connected to Swautistic or other online personas.

He has been arrested at least twice before, according to county records — once earlier this year for unknown reasons, and once in 2015, when he called a phony bomb threat in to the ABC affiliate in Glendale, the station reported.

Reporters had to broadcast the evening news while bomb-sniffing dogs traipsed through their building that day, KABC reported, and Barriss received a two-year sentence.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Barriss had been arrested in 2016. The arrest was in early 2017.

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ISTANBUL — Anti-government protests spurred by economic woes hit Iran for a third day Saturday, news agencies and social media reported, in what has quickly emerged as a significant challenge to the administration of President Hassan Rouhani.

Demonstrators protesting price hikes and high unemployment turned out in cities and towns across the country, defying police and voicing anger at the cleric-ruled government, in an extraordinary display of public dissent.

Officials warned Saturday that citizens should stay away from “illegal gatherings,” even as protests spread to new regions.

Footage emerged late Saturday of demonstrators appearing to attack government buildings and engaging in violent confrontations with police. The BBC Persian service reported that two demonstrators had been shot in the western part of the country, citing video on social media. One video from Tehran showed protesters tearing down posters of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds absolute authority in Iran. The images were posted online and could not immediately be verified.

The demonstrations were the largest since a 2009 uprising over disputed election results. Those protests — dubbed the “Green Movement” — were quashed by security forces.

“This is more grass roots. It’s much more spontaneous, which makes it more unpredictable,” Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute in Washington, said of the current protests.

“Things are not working out economically for ordinary Iranians,” he said. “But the root causes, and the much deeper resentment, go back decades. People do not feel this regime represents them.”

President Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday afternoon that “the entire world understands that the good people of Iran want change.”

“Iran’s people are what their leaders fear the most,” he said.

Earlier in the day, after a prior Trump tweet, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman lashed out at the American president, saying Iran “does not pay attention to the opportunistic claims by U.S. officials,” according to state media.

[The U.S. is on a collision course with Iran in the Middle East]

Rouhani, a moderate, was elected to a second four-year term in May, pledging that he would continue to open Iran up to the world. But he has so far failed to deliver on promises of a revived economy in the wake of the 2015 nuclear deal, which was his signature achievement.

That agreement with the United States and five other world powers curbed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions. But rampant corruption, problems in the banking sector, and unilateral U.S. sanctions have hindered the country’s economic progress.

[What is the Iran nuclear deal?]

Rouhani released a proposed budget this month that called for slashing cash subsidies to the poor and increasing in fuel prices — part of an effort to reduce debt and move the economy away from oil exports. The plan also included new and added fees for things like car registration and an unpopular departure tax which sparked fierce public debate.

Anger over the budget, and a recent 40 percent jump in the price of eggs, helped stir the protests, analysts said.

“Since Rouhani entered office, he has managed to inflate expectations with lofty rhetoric but has actually done little to change the reality of life on the ground in Iran,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington.

According to an unidentified protester from the western city of Kermanshah, who spoke Friday to the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, “people poured into the streets . . . because they are tired of the rising cost of living.”

The center maintains a wide network of contacts inside Iran.

“When we don’t have bread to eat, we are not afraid of anything,” the protester was quoted as saying.

A video purportedly from Tehran that appeared Saturday evening showed demonstrators calling on police to join them.

Iran’s state media largely ignored the demonstrations, painting them as the work of anti-Iranian groups.

“Counterrevolution groups and foreign media are continuing their organized efforts to misuse the people’s economic and livelihood problems and their legitimate demands to provide an opportunity for unlawful gatherings and possibly chaos,” the Associated Press quoted state television as saying late Saturday.

Government media focused their coverage on thousands of Iranians who attended pro-government rallies Saturday marking the anniversary of the end of the unrest in 2009.

Back then, supporters of reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi challenged the reelection of a hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sparking mass protests. They were crushed by Iranian security forces, and activists and dissidents were beaten and jailed.

On Saturday, Iran’s minister of information and communications technology, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, took to Twitter to urge the head of the messaging app Telegram to shut down the Iranian Amad News channel, which the minister accused of aiding the protests.

“A Telegram channel is encouraging hateful conduct, use of Molotov cocktails, armed uprising, and social unrest,” Jahromi said. Telegram is widely popular among Iranians and even government officials.

Telegram’s director, Pavel Durov, responded that he had ordered the channel shut, citing Telegram’s “no calls for violence” rule.

“Be careful — there are lines one shouldn’t cross,” he posted on Twitter.

Taleblu, the analyst, said that the demonstrations “prove that there is widespread discontent in Iran, that it can be triggered at any time.”

“These protests also show that . . . Iranians see the regime and its mismanagement as an impediment to their daily lives,” he said.

Others, however, warned about the effectiveness of demonstrations that lack a cohesive strategy or broader political vision.

“Socio-economic discontent [should not] be equated with effective political resistance,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor of Iran coverage at Al-Monitor, an online news portal, wrote of the protests.

“Without necessary resources . . . change remains a remote prospect,” he wrote.

Read more

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It’s up to Congress to keep or kill the Iran nuclear deal. Here’s how lawmakers could do either.

Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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