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:
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:
The claim that Denver Police have arrested more than 50 Al-Queda [sic] members in the last two months is false.
-- Denver Police Dept. (@DenverPolice) February 5, 2024
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.
