Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $965m (£869m) in damages after falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.

According to a report in BBC, the families of eight victims, and an FBI agent who responded to the attack, had sought at least $550m in the defamation trial in Connecticut.

They alleged the right-wing radio host’s misinformation led to a decade of harassment and death threats.

Twenty children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Jones, who founded the conspiracy-laden Infowars website and talk show, argued for years that the massacre was a “staged” government plot to take guns from Americans and that “no-one died”.

He called the parents of victims “crisis actors” and argued that some of them never actually existed.