Does a viral image of a man at the Western Wall actually show Cole Tomas Allen, the man charged with the attempted assassination of the sitting U.S. president? No, that's not true: Lead Stories found no credible sources linking the image to Cole Tomas Allen. Available evidence strongly indicates that the image is a product of generative AI.
The claim originated from a post (archived here) published on April 27, 2026, under the caption:
Checkmate.
The post shared an image of a man at the Western Wall. This is what that picture looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @TonyMichaelX on X.)
The implication was that this is Cole Tomas Allen, the suspected shooter at the 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner (archived here), whose photo from LinkedIn many news organizations, including NBC, incorporated in their coverage of the incident (archived here).
The first post with the image reviewed in this fact check, however, showed a label identifying it as AI-generated:
(Image source: post by @TonyMichaelX on X.)
The fingernail on the man's thumb in the viral image did not match the suspect's real photo:
(Image sources: LinkedIn, X).
The Hive Moderation AI-Generated Content Detection tool concluded the image was 99.9% 'likely to be AI-generated':
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
ZeroGPT concluded that the picture was "97% FAKE":
(Image source: ZeroGPT.)
