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Claim: A Facebook user shares different images claiming that Hausas attacked the Igbo market in the North as retaliation for the incident in Edo.
Verdict: FALSE! Two of the images shared are AI-generated, while the other two are old pictures from earlier in the year and 2023.
Full Text
On Friday, March 28, 2025, 16 people were allegedly killed by vigilante members on Thursday in the headquarters of the Esan North East Local Government Area of the state on suspicion of being criminals.
According to reports, the individuals were en route to Kano and travelling in a commercial truck when local security stopped them. Upon searching the travellers, they uncovered guns, which made them round them up and take the law into their hands, lynching them. Following this, Comfort Ikechukwu, through All Nigeria Political parties, shared some pictures, claiming that the Northern community had allegedly retaliated attacks against the Igbo community in the North.
In the post made on March 31, 2025, Comfort noted that at least six Igbo men had been killed and ten others injured as a group of armed Hausa youth invaded an Igbo market in the North, attacking anyone in sight.
She further wrote that people should contact their family members as police were nowhere to be found, and the attackers were also heading to Igbo residential areas, attempting to set entire buildings on fire with Igbo residents still inside.
“Eyewitnesses calling for help report that the police are nowhere to be seen. One caller stated that he could hear gunshots and the screams of Igbo victims burning to death in the next building, which was already engulfed in flames. Call your family in the north right now, please help and share to alert more Igbos in the north,” she concluded.
Similar claims can also be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Given the strained relationships between the tribes involved and the possibility of a tribal conflict, DUBAWA decided to investigate the claim to avoid additional tension.
Verification
DUBAWA conducted a keyword search on the killings but could not find any credible news reports.
We then decided to do a reverse image search, revealing that one of the images attached to the claim had appeared online on Sept. 8, 2023. The picture was a screengrab from a video shared with ACI Africa showing the parish house at St. Raphael Fadan Kamantan Catholic Church of the Diocese of Kafanchan in flames.
We also used Google Lens on another image and discovered it was an old image from March 11, 2025, when the tanker explosion that wreaked havoc in Lagos occurred.
DUBAWA suspected that the other two images were AI-generated, so we decided to confirm. We used Hive Moderation and saw that two of the images were AI-generated, with ratings of 99.3% and 99.7%, respectively.
Conclusion
This claim is false. Two of the images used in the post were old and had appeared online in 2023, while the rest were likely to contain AI-generated content.
