Police in the UK are seeking help to identify a stabbing victim who was found inside a car submerged in a canal.
This is a hoax. No such incident has been reported in the UK and the posts use pictures from unrelated cases from the US.
A series of Facebook posts which claim police in the UK need help identifying a stabbing victim found inside a car submerged in a canal are false.
The posts appear in various Facebook community groups, including local buy and sell groups, from different locations around the UK.
One post, published on a group for those living in and around Bishop’s Stortford, says: “UNIDENTIFIED man found in a vehicle submerged by the canal in Bishop. The Police needs urgent assistance in identifying this man found last night with multiple stad wounds and dumped in his car by the canal.
“He’s in a critical condition and missing his ID’s/ Drivers License, No phone, No nothing. LET’S BUMP THIS POST so that it reaches his family. IT ONLY TAKES 2 SECONDS TO SHARE [sic]”.
Similar posts with the same pictures have been shared in Facebook groups for other parts of the UK, including Ayrshire and Chatham, each claiming the stabbing victim was found in that location.
These posts are false. None of the police forces in the locations named in the posts—Hertfordshire Constabulary, Police Scotland and Kent Police—have reported such an incident.
The posts include a photograph of a man with a bandaged head lying in a hospital bed who has had a breathing tube inserted and appears to be connected to multiple medical devices. The posts include a second image apparently showing a car being recovered from a river or canal.
A reverse image search reveals the first photo is actually that of a man named Josh Tidmore who died in the US state of Alabama in 2021 after contracting Covid-19 at the age of 36. The image of the car being recovered from the canal originates from coverage of an incident in West Palm Beach, Florida, in February this year. A woman who had gone missing was found dead inside the vehicle.
We also found other posts in local Facebook groups for Chesterfield, Basingstoke and Bishop’s Stortford again that use very similar wording, but include an image of a different hospitalised man. In these cases, the image originates from an incident involving a man left injured following an altercation outside a bar in Evansville, Indiana in early April.
We’ve written before about similar posts falsely raising the alarm for missing people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. Our 2023 investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing.
In February, we found these hoax posts continue to be an issue, with at least 47 communities across the UK being victim to nine different hoaxes we fact checked that month.
Hoaxes pose a risk to user engagement with local community news because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false. We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false no such incident has been reported at any of the UK locations and the pictures are from separate cases in the US.
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