Does a viral image show a suspect in the U.K. stabbing that left three little girls dead in July 2024? No, that's not true: Posts on social media recycled an unrelated image from 2023. The police did not disclose the identity of the person arrested or release an image of him.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on July 30, 2024. It began:
This is the man 'from Cardiff' that murdered little girls. Straight off a boat.
The words seen in the shared image continued:
17 year old
Demonic monster.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Jul 30 22:08:15 2024 UTC)
The entry implied that what resembled a screenshot of a video showed a suspect in the Southport stabbing in the U.K. on July 29, 2024, that left three young girls dead (archived here).
The image, however, predates the attack by 11 months: It has been circulating online at least since September 2023 (archived here).
Furthermore, the post falsely referred to the suspect in the Southport case as a foreign-born person.
After a vigil turned into clashes with the police the day after the stabbing, Merseyside Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said in a statement on the department's website :
A 17-year-old male from Banks [England] in Lancashire, who was born in Cardiff, has been arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder and has been taken to a police station where he will be interviewed by detectives
There has been much speculation and hypothesis around the status of a 17-year-old male who is currently in police custody and some individuals are using this to bring violence and disorder to our streets ... We have already said that the person arrested was born in the U.K. and speculation helps nobody at this time.
The police did not publicly identify the suspect: In the U.K., the law (archived here) prevents releasing the names of the people under criminal investigation until they reach the age of 18 in most situations.
The claim that is the focus of this fact check was published by the account of online influencer and former kickboxer Andrew Tate, a dual citizen of the U.S. and U.K. who was arrested in Romania on December 29, 2022 (archived here), on charges of human trafficking, organized crime and rape (archived here).
Other Lead Stories fact checks about current events are here.
