Fact Check: Denver Police Department Has NOT Arrested More Than '50 Al-Qaeda Members' -- Department Denied The Claim

Fact Check

  • by: Marlo Lee
Fact Check: Denver Police Department Has NOT Arrested More Than '50 Al-Qaeda Members' -- Department Denied The Claim Police Denied

Did the Denver Police Department arrest "over 50 Al-Qaeda members in the last two months"? No, that's not true: The Denver Police Department has refuted that claim. Lead Stories did not find any credible evidence for this claim in a search of online news indexes, either.

The claim appeared on X, formerly Twitter, (archived here) where it was published on February 4, 2024. The on-screen text read, "50 AL-QAUDA [sic] MEMBERS ARRESTED IN DENVER SOURCE- DENVER POLICE OFFICER." It opened with:

So, I just had a conversation with a Denver police officer at the airport, and we were talking about the crime that's going on, not only in Denver, but our country.

This is what the post looked like on Twitter at the time of writing:

Screenshot 2024-02-05 at 09.37.51.png

Twitter screenshot(Source: Twitter screenshot taken on Mon Feb 5 15:04:48 2024 UTC)

For the rest of the video, this unidentified man speaks about how a police officer told him that the Denver Police Department has arrested "over 50 Al-Qaeda members" and how there are sleeper agents from various parts of the world in the United States. The man in the video does not mention the name of the officer he spoke to.

Al-Qaeda is a "broad-based militant Islamist organization founded by Osama bin Laden," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

The Denver Police Department's official X account posted a statement (archived here) saying that the claim they've arrested over 50 Al-Qaeda members is false. Below is the post:

Searching "Denver Police Department AND arrested over 50 Al-Qaeda members" did not yield any significant results in the index of thousands of news sites combed via Google News (archived here).

Other Lead Stories articles on police officers are here.

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Marlo Lee is a fact checker at Lead Stories. She is a graduate of Howard University with a B.S. in Biology. Her interest in fact checking started in college, when she realized how important it became in American politics. She lives in Maryland.

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