IN SHORT: A video exhibiting the taking pictures of a whole bunch of individuals by terrorists has circulated on social media with the declare it reveals bandits killing folks kidnapped in Sokoto in northwestern Nigeria. However that is false – the video reveals a jihadist terrorist assault filmed in Burkina Faso.
Warning: This fact-check hyperlinks to a disturbing video exhibiting a violent assault.
A chilling video exhibiting a whole bunch of individuals in a trench being shot at shut vary has circulated on WhatsApp and Fb in Nigeria, with the declare it reveals bandits killing 150 folks kidnapped in Sokoto in north-west Nigeria.
“Bandits kill these 150 neighborhood folks kidnapped in SOKOTO STATE, as the government refused to pay 200 Billion ransom with 250 Bikes,” one caption to the video posted on Facebook reads.
A number of posts on Fb have shared the video with the identical declare, together with here, here and here.
The declare additionally seems in different posts here, here and here. (Word: See extra situations on the finish of the report.)
However is that this declare an correct description of the viral video?
Violent crime by bandits escalating
Organised criminals, recognized regionally as bandits, have plagued northwestern and central Nigeria for years. A 2021 BBC report describes the issue: “Gangs on motorbikes terrorise the area, stealing animals, kidnapping for ransom, killing anybody who dares confront them and taxing farmers – it is an enormous money-making operation.”
There was an escalation of violent assaults and kidnapping by bandits in Sokoto state in August 2024.
There are media reports of bandits kidnapping about 150 people and rustling over 1,000 cattle in some villages within the Gobir emirate of Sokoto state, days after killing the local emir.
An emir is an Islamic army commander, governor of a province, or a excessive army official.
President Bola Tinubu has directed the defence minister and army chief to relocate to Sokoto to “flush out the bandits”. There have been no credible media reviews that any of the kidnapped folks have been killed.
Video reveals terror assault in Burkina Faso
Africa Verify did a reverse picture search of screenshots from the video, which led to quite a few outcomes, together with a report in a Sudanese newspaper written in Arabic.
We used Google Translate to translate the report into English. It stated that the video had been falsely attributed to occasions in Sudan however the newspaper’s investigations confirmed the occasion occurred in Burkina Faso.
“Bloggers attributed the occasions to the Speedy Help militia within the Al Daein space, however the Juhayna Crew web site carried out an investigation into the origin of the video and confirmed that the occasions occurred in Burkina Faso earlier and don’t have anything to do with Sudan,” the machine-translated report reads.
We then searched additional, utilizing key phrases associated to killings in Burkina Faso. This led us to a Reuters report of a whole bunch killed in north-central Burkina Faso on 27 August after “suspected jihadists opened fireplace on them as they had been digging trenches round a city to guard it from assaults.”
We additionally discovered a YouTube video report by Reuters concerning the killing in Burkina Faso, which incorporates the video in query.
The United Nations has condemned the terror attack in Burkina Faso, which has been attributed to an Al Qaeda-linked militant group generally known as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, or JNIM.
The declare that the video reveals bandits killing 150 kidnap victims in Sokoto, north-western Nigeria is fake.
The identical declare was additionally posted here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
