Fake Facebook profile claims Bondi attacker ‘from Israel’published at 16:31 GMT 16 December
Shayan Sardarizadeh
BBC Verify senior journalist
A fake image that purports to show the “leaked” Facebook profile of one of the Bondi beach shooters has been widely shared online to spread a false claim he was a Jewish man from Israel.
The caption does not name the attacker it supposedly shows, Naveed Akram, but the account does use images of him which have been edited to show him wearing a kippah, a religious head covering worn by many Jewish people.
“His real name is David Cohen and he’s JEWISH, FROM ISRAEL,” the caption adds.
The image, which has racked up millions of views on Instagram and X, has a caption that claims it shows the Facebook profile of one of the two attackers “before it got deleted”.
BBC Verify has established that the image is fake, featuring several spelling and layout errors that are incompatible with genuine Facebook profiles.
These include the phrase “add a new friends” in the about section and illegible buttons such as “eeopis” and “ernsage”, which indicate generative AI may have been used to create the fake profile.
We ran a search for the name David Cohen on Facebook and found no profile matching the one in the false posts.
There’s no evidence that the two shooters, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, were Jewish or from Israel. According to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the attack appears to have been “motivated by Islamic State ideology”.
