Are goats being sacrificed in this Hackney office?

Live animals dragged into a trendy east London building and never seen again • Fire rituals in London cemeteries • Bones left by strangers' graves • What is going on?

The CCTV footage of the goat, filmed late at night in an office block in central Hackney on 17 April, is clear.

At 10.22pm a man drags the animal by its horns through double doors into a rented office, a rope trailing from the goat’s neck. A second man quickly follows, carrying a folded-up cage.

The goat being dragged into the Hackney office late at night and the men leaving without the animal six hours later.

The goat is never seen again. Instead, the CCTV records the same men leaving the room at 4.31am without the animal. One man is carrying a black rubbish bag, while another man hands over a transparent plastic container, containing an item that resembles horns, to a third participant.

The day after the CCTV footage was recorded, a video posted to the men’s Instagram account shows what appears to be the same goat inside the office, its horns being tightly gripped. Another video on the same account shows the same goat motionless on the ground. A man kneels over it with his hands raised in the air and chanting. The office’s walls are painted black and red.

We asked Ben Dustan, the president of the Goat Veterinary Society, whether he had encountered anything like this before. “Only in horror stories,” he said.

The man on the CCTV who dragged the goat into the office has a record of similar activity. London Centric has found years of Instagram posts featuring him holding dead birds by the legs, posing with a severed goat’s head, or pushing animal hearts wrapped in leaves into the earth with his bloody hands.

What’s more, when not operating from the Hackney office, in a building shared with business tenants such as viral political campaign group Led By Donkeys, the man appears to carry out similar rituals in the capital’s public cemeteries.

Photos of the man conducting a ritual (left), chicken feet on a grave in a west London cemetery found by London Centric this week (right)

In recent weeks London Centric has uncovered videos of his organisation conducting elaborate ceremonies involving animal body parts, explosives and the burning of replica coffins by graves belonging to unrelated individuals.

But who is this man running a “black magic” temple a few minutes’ walk from Hackney town hall? What is he doing in there? And how does it all come back to a chef called Hugo who used to work for Marco Pierre White?

Read more and watch the CCTV footage below: