Fact check: Picture of armed man in viral posts not Hausa hunter killed in Edo
On Friday, a group of Hausa hunters were accosted by a mob in Uromi, Edo state while travelling to Kano and killed in a gruesome manner.
The mob suspected they were kidnappers and meted out jungle justice on the hunters.
Many posts justifying the mob’s actions have sprung up on social media, with some using disinformation as a basis for their claim. One such post was by @CollinsZagaa, an X user.
He posted a picture of a man armed with a rifle and a walkie-talkie in his chest pocket standing on a prayer mat in a place that appeared to be a forest.
He captioned it: “Fulani hunters going to Kano then branched to Edo to catch antelope.”
The post garnered one million views, 13,000 likes, and 78 comments and was shared over 2,000 times.
The Guardian also found another post by a Facebook user, Kemi Talks.
Her post had 3,000 reactions and over 2,000 comments. It has been shared over 800 times.
Checks by The Guardian revealed that the account belongs to controversial self-acclaimed Nigerian journalist Kemi Olunloyo.
kemi talks
screenshot of kemi talks post
The Facebook user posted the same picture as the one in @CollinsZagaa’s post.
She wrote, “One of the young men kpaied in Edo state heading to Kano for Eid when they decided to branch Edo State. He was a Fulani hunter. I have seen some of them destroying cassava farms and videoing themselves doing it”.
Claim: The armed man in viral posts was one of the hunters killed by the mob in Edo.
Verification: The Guardian did a reverse image search by uploading the image on TinEye, an image verification tool, to determine when the image first appeared online.
The Guardian found that the image was first indexed by TinEye on August 28, 2024.
The Guardian also used Google Reverse Image Search to verify the image.
Google generated articles and other social media posts where the image had first appeared.
One such was posted by Zagazola Makama, a security and intelligence expert, on February 22, 2024.
Zagazola identified the armed man as Boderi Ishaku, a notorious bandit who had masterminded several deadly attacks.
Ishaku was killed by security forces in 2024.
Verdict: The armed man in viral posts was not one of the Northern hunters killed by a mob in Edo.
