Is the name of a suspect in the Graz shooting Samuel Haider? No, that's not true: A viral post recycled the meme in circulation since 2015 that casts the comedian Sam Hyde as an attacker after mass shootings in the U.S. or abroad. No credible media organization reported that anyone named "Samuel Haider" was connected to the events in Graz.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on June 10, 2025. It opened:
According to survivors of the shooting spree in #Graz the suspect is said to be former student Samuel Haider. The self-proclaimed gun fanatic tried to join the mercenary group "Wagner" through a recruitment agency in Serbia in 2023, but was rejected for unspecified reasons. #Austria #School
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)
The entry referred to the shooting in the Austrian city of Graz that occurred on the day of the post's publication, shortly after 10 a.m. local time (archived here). According to the authorities (archived here), the suspected attacker was a 21-year-old former student in the high school where he killed nine people before taking his own life.
As of this writing, the suspect's name hasn't been released to the public, and no images of that person were published on the local police's account on X (archived here).
Yet, we can be confident that the suspect was not "Samuel Haider": That is a version of the long-running meme (archived here) that has resurfaced after multiple shootings and falsely attributed blame to comedian Sam Hyde whose image (archived here) is seen in the post in question. In each iteration of the prank, which surfaced in 2015, his image is paired with a name that sounds like Sam Hyde.
In June 2025, no credible media outlet linked the name of "Samuel Haider" to the shooting in Graz, as seen on Google News:
(Source: Google News screenshot by Lead Stories)
Over the years, Lead Stories has extensively written about the "Sam Hyde" hoax. Those fact checks can be found here.
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Other Lead Stories articles concerning current events are here.
Fact checks concerning international topics can be found here.
