04 July 2023

This video does not show a Muslim sniper during 2023 France riots

Video seems to have first appeared on Twitter in 2022

By Haseem uz Zaman

Claim: A video shows a Muslim rioter stationed as a sniper on top of a building in Paris amid the recent France riots that erupted over the police killing of an Algerian teenage boy.

Fact: The video has no link to the 2023 France riots; it was first posted in 2022.

On 30 June 2023, Twitter account @ConvictFluffy posted a video of what appears to be a sniper positioned atop a building, claiming it is from France.

The video is captioned as follows:

“🚨!BREAKING!🚨
Muslim rioters are now stealing rifles from police vans and hideout on rooftops like snipers. How much further does it need to go before EU-“leaders” will dare to speak out and stop uncontrolled immigation? #FranceRiots #FranceViolence”

France has been hit by countrywide protests following the police killing on 27 June 2023 of Nahel M, a 17-year-old Algerian boy of a single mother, at a traffic check. Nahel’s death has become “another example of the treatment by police of young men of Arab and African backgrounds”, according to a France24 report (archive).

The teenager worked as a delivery driver and was enrolled in a dedicated programme “to help with the integration of young people from troubled neighbourhoods through sports”, the family’s lawyer said, as per the publication. “Nahel had no criminal record.”

Nahel was “too young to hold a full licence in France”, The Independent (archive) wrote.

Fact or Fiction?

Soch Fact Check reverse-searched keyframes from the video and came across a tweet (archive) from HoaxEye — a fact-finding Twitter account run by Janne Ahlberg, a “product security professional and pentester” — saying the video “is not related to recent riots in France”.

Further down the thread, HoaxEye quotes @nickmartin (archive), a journalist “covering hate and extremism”, to say (archive) the video appeared on Twitter as early as March 2022.

The 14 March 2022 tweet is by @Adaminho, who captioned the video as follows: “Sniper de la cité [City sniper].”

Since the video appeared more than a year ago, it has no linkage to the 2023 France riots.

Virality

Soch Fact Check found multiple posts that appear to contain an anti-migrant narrative, such as this and this. Other instances of the video posted in the context of the 2023 France riots can be seen here, here, here, here, and here.