Content creator misidentified as Southport attack suspect

What's the claim? 

An image of an individual has gone viral on social media claiming that he is the suspect allegedly involved in the fatal stabbing of three children in the north-west of England on July 29, 2024. Other users sharing the image claimed that the media is hiding the "true identity" of the attacker by releasing pictures of him as a child to show "innocence."

A Facebook user sharing the image wrote, "The up to date photo of Southport Killer Not the one some MSM have put out to make appear like a child." An archived version of the post is here. This claim was also shared on X (formerly Twitter), and archived versions of similar posts are here and here.

Screenshot of claims made online. (Source: Facebook/Modified by Logically Facts)

However, the person in the image is not the Southport attack suspect but instead a content creator.

What we found 

We found that the individual with curly hair wearing a beige T-shirt pictured in the viral post is a content creator named Axel Du Ciel Ndwanyi. A reverse image search of the image led us to a TikTok account with the username "@benidedieu1231," where we can spot the same individual seen in the viral photo. 

We found a video (archived here) uploaded by the user on August 5, 2024, in which he says that he has been misidentified as the Southport attack suspect and that his image is being misused.

In the eight-minute video, Ndwanyi clarifies that while he shares the first name of the attack suspect, he was not involved.

What happened in Southport?

On July 29, 2024, a knife attack in Southport, England, led to the deaths of three young girls, with eight other children and two adults injured. Initially, under the law, the media was not allowed to name the suspect as he was under the age of 18 at the time. To address the resulting misinformation and unrest, a judge made the rare decision to publicly name the then 17-year-old suspect as Axel Rudakubana, who appeared in a Liverpool court facing three counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder. 

While the U.K. court has not released an official image of the accused, the image of a child circulating widely is from a BBC Children in Need charity campaign video from 2018 that the accused was a part of. The teenager charged with the murder of three girls at a dance class appeared in the BBC advertisement when he was 11 years old, and the BBC took down the video after the incident.

The verdict

The individual in the image is a content creator, Axel Du Ciel Ndwanyi, not the accused suspect in the Southport incident.