A video of three adults and a child being robbed at gunpoint moments after they enter a lift was shared on Facebook in Kenya on 1 September 2020.
“BEWARE: This happened at Sarit Centre Nairobi,” the caption reads.
The Sarit Centre is a mall in the Westlands neighbourhood of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
In the video, just after the four walk into the lift two men stop it from closing, one standing between the lift doors and the other holding the outer hinged door open. The second man points a gun while the first grabs phones from the victims.
But the Sarit Centre’s lifts don’t have an outer door. Did this alarming incident really happen at the Westlands mall recently? We checked.
We used the InVID verification tool to extract frames from the video for a Google reverse image search. This revealed that the robbery actually took place at 2061 St Raymond Avenue in the US city of New York in 2017.
The video was published in an article in the New York Post on 25 August 2020.
“The NYPD released shocking new video Tuesday of an unsolved gunpoint robbery from three years ago that depicts a pair of goons rip the watch off a man’s wrist as a frightened child looks on,” the article says.
It then asks readers with any information on the crime to call a police hotline. – Grace Gichuhi
“BEWARE: This happened at Sarit Centre Nairobi,” the caption reads.
The Sarit Centre is a mall in the Westlands neighbourhood of Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.
In the video, just after the four walk into the lift two men stop it from closing, one standing between the lift doors and the other holding the outer hinged door open. The second man points a gun while the first grabs phones from the victims.
But the Sarit Centre’s lifts don’t have an outer door. Did this alarming incident really happen at the Westlands mall recently? We checked.
‘Pair of goons’
We used the InVID verification tool to extract frames from the video for a Google reverse image search. This revealed that the robbery actually took place at 2061 St Raymond Avenue in the US city of New York in 2017.
The video was published in an article in the New York Post on 25 August 2020.
“The NYPD released shocking new video Tuesday of an unsolved gunpoint robbery from three years ago that depicts a pair of goons rip the watch off a man’s wrist as a frightened child looks on,” the article says.
It then asks readers with any information on the crime to call a police hotline. – Grace Gichuhi
Republish our content for free
For publishers: what to do if your post is rated false
A fact-checker has rated your Facebook or Instagram post as “false”, “altered”, “partly false” or “missing context”. This could have serious consequences. What do you do?
Click on our guide for the steps you should follow.
Publishers guideAfrica Check teams up with Facebook
Africa Check is a partner in Meta's third-party fact-checking programme to help stop the spread of false information on social media.
The content we rate as “false” will be downgraded on Facebook and Instagram. This means fewer people will see it.
You can also help identify false information on Facebook. This guide explains how.
Add new comment