Saudi crown prince escapes assassination attempt in Riyadh

Rating Justification

The iVerify Pakistan team has checked this content and has established that it is false.

To arrive at this verdict, the iVerify Pakistan team investigated the alleged video of the incident through reverse image search to confirm if an assassination attempt on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman really occurred or not.

HOW IT STARTED

On May 7, 2024, a pro-Israeli account made a post on X regarding an alleged assassination attempt on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, gaining 1.2 million views.

The caption said, “Report in Riyadh: Bin Salman survives an assassination attempt.”

Soon after, a 14-second long video was shared by a Pakistani user showing several police vehicles on a road in Riyadh while a car burned.

The caption said, “Emergency alert. Assassination attack on Saudi King Mohammed bin Salman
King Salman was safe in the attack, but there are reports of martyrdom of the guards.”

The post gained 33,300 views.

The same video was reshared by an Indian user as well with the caption, “Breaking: Arab sources are reporting an assassination attempt against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Three Pakistani nationals were arrested in this Conspiracy.”

The post was viewed by more than 304,000 users and was reshared 1,200 times.

The same video along with captions on the alleged attack were shared here, here and here with view counts of 1m, 444,000 and 825,000 respectively.

Former federal minister Fawad Chaudhry also extended his condolences regarding the alleged incident. In a post on his X account on May 7, he said: “HRH crown prince MBS is symbol of modern Islamic state leadership, prayers for the wellbeing, security and comfort of HRH … from Pakistan #SaudiArabia.”

METHODOLOGY

The iVerify Pakistan team initiated an investigation into the claim due to its virality and also because of the serious nature of the claim concerning an assassination attempt on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an important and influential political figure.

To verify the claim, the team initially ran screenshots taken from the video through reverse image search and found several accounts sharing the video and garnering significant viewership.

However, the team could not trace where the video was originally shared or a longer uncut version.

Furthermore, searching for relevant keywords such as “Saudi crown prince attack”, “assassination of Mohammed Bin Salman”, etc did not yield any news report from mainstream news outlets thus posing an anomaly since an attack of this scale and nature would have been widely covered.

A deeper investigation of the various content being shared online and user responses to it led to an X post from Shayan Sardarizadeh, a senior journalist covering disinformation, extremism and conspiracy theories for BBC Monitoring’s disinformation team as part of BBC Verify.

Sharing the screenshots of how the incident was being shared, he wrote, “A totally baseless claim about an assassination attempt on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is going viral on X after being shared by fake osint accounts and well-known misinformation spreaders seeking engagement. There’s zero evidence for the claim.”

Meanwhile, Saudi investigative journalist Hussein Al Ghawi said the video was from March 2024.

A March 16 post he linked to of the General Directorate of Saudi Civil Defence had the caption: “In Riyadh, a fire in two vehicles was extinguished following a traffic accident, and no injuries were reported.”

It also contained a picture of a firefighter hosing two cars in a collision together, one is black and one is white.

Comparing a screenshot taken from the viral video and the image shared by the civil defence directorate, showed common elements between the two such as the electronic sign and a door to the side of the building.

Although the name of the shop ‘Alkhunaizan’ written in English and Arabic languages in the background is blurred, it appears to be the same as in the video.

CONCLUSION

The iVerify Pakistan team has concluded that the claim regarding the viral video depicting an assassination attempt on the Saudi crown prince in Riyadh is false.

The video actually pertains to an incident that occurred in Riyadh on March 16, 2024, not on May 7. It was a collision that caused the two vehicles to catch fire.

The police protocol present in the video was also scant than what would realistically be expected in an accident involving a high-level state functionary.

Evidence and References

March 16, 2024, X post of General Directorate of Saudi Civil Defence:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240507090131/https://twitter.com/SaudiDCD/status/1768837567502311831