In Hamburg, seven people and probably the perpetrators die in an attack on an event of Jehovah's Witnesses. Videos of the crime scene are quickly circulating the web – but one of them shows something completely different.
Shots were heard in the north of Hamburg on Thursday evening. The Hamburg police rushed in and cordoned off a three-storey office building from which the shots came. According to the police, when the emergency services entered the house, they found eight bodies, including “apparently the alleged perpetrator”. According to previous knowledge, he acted alone. Other people are said to have been seriously injured in the attack in the Alsterdorf district.
While the background to the deadly shots is still unclear, several videos allegedly showing the crime scene quickly spread on social media. One of them shows a scene on a busy street at night, filmed from an elevated position from a house across the street. Shots and shouts can be heard in the 27-second clip. The video is uploaded and shared dozens of times on Twitter and Youtube.
Claim: In a tweet, one user wrote: “In Hamburg, Germany (Alsterdorf district), at least six people died after shooting at the center of Jehovah's Witnesses.” To do this, the user posts a video of a shooting that is supposed to show the crime. More than 120,000 Twitter users see this post alone.
DW fact check: False.
Contrary to what many social media users claim, the video does not show the alleged shooting in Hamburg and does not come from Germany. Although the video quality is not very good, if you zoom in, you can clearly see that the curbs are painted alternately red and yellow. This coloring is unusual for curbs in Germany. Also in the video, a voice can be heard saying “someone is on the ground” in Hebrew, followed by the repeated exclamation “oh my God” in English.
Video shows assassination in Tel Aviv< /h2>
A reverse image search with common search engines leads to no hits. We found a trace of this on Twitter: some social media users commented on the video with the words “Tel Aviv”. We follow this trail and when researching in search engines we come across an assassination attempt in Tel Aviv on March 9th. The Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel, among others, report on this. An armed attacker injured three people, one of them seriously, before being fatally hit by bullets himself. According to media information, the militant Islamist Palestinian organization Hamas claimed responsibility for the crime, as reported by the Reuters news agency.
Both Israeli newspapers mention the location of the incident: Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. Doing another search for the same shooting on Dizengoff Street, we came across this tweet from the news channel Nexta, showing the exact same video as the users tweeting about the incident in Hamburg. So everything indicates that the video was not made in Hamburg but in Tel Aviv.
Netanyahu describes the act as a “terrorist attack”
Geolocation brings certainty: We are looking for Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv and clues that we can see in the video: A bench, next to it a lantern, a tree, a bus stop with neon signs and the red and yellow curbs at the edge of the road. To narrow the search down a bit, we're looking for more videos showing the Tel Aviv crime. Some of the videos (Warning! Violence) and a photo published by the Times of Israel show business names on the facades of the houses: Blueberry and Buy Digital. A search for these businesses on Dizengoff Street with Google Maps actually leads us to the crime scene. On Google Street View at 181 Dizengoff Street you can clearly see the bank, lantern, tree, bus stop and the red and yellow curbs, as well as the store with the name Blueberry.
Geolocation via Google Street View: Dizengoff Street via Google Street View shows the same elements as the Twitter video: bench (red), lantern (blue), Tree (green) and bus stop (yellow).
The video can thus be clearly located: It was shot in Tel Aviv, not in Hamburg, and it therefore does not show the killing spree in the Alsterdorf district, but the assassination attempt of one Palestinian who is said to have belonged to Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the act as a “terrorist attack”.