Category World News

In the hours after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated, details about his attacker remained elusive, and social media users and live TV commentary filled the void with false information.

As of late afternoon on September 11, the day after the shooting at Utah Valley University, where Kirk had been speaking, authorities did not have the shooter in custody and had not released any suspect’s name.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents “have been working around the clock in coordination with our law enforcement partners,” FBI special agent Robert Bohls said during a news conference on Thursday. “We are and will continue to work nonstop until we find the person that has committed this heinous crime and find out why they did it.”

Two people were taken into custody on the day of the shooting, but neither was the culprit, and both were released.

The FBI released images on Thursday of a “person of interest” and asked the public for help identifying the attacker.

Here’s a rundown of what didn’t happen, despite claims to the contrary.

No evidence the sniper might have been a Kirk supporter

About an hour after the shooting, before Kirk’s death was announced, political commentator Matthew Dowd suggested during an MSNBC broadcast that the sniper could have been a Kirk supporter.

“We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration or – so we have no idea about this,” Dowd said.

While the attacker remains at large, there is no evidence that the person was a Kirk supporter or someone celebrating.

State and federal authorities said a sniper fired a single shot from a high-powered bolt-action rifle that was later recovered in a wooded area outside the university campus. A university spokesperson said law enforcement believes the person fired from the roof of a building some distance from Kirk.

Dowd was fired hours later for his comments, which also included statements about Kirk using “hateful words” that led to “hateful actions”. MSNBC and Dowd both apologised for the rhetoric.

George Zinn was taken into custody, but is not the attacker

Immediately after the shooting, videos of a bald man being dragged away by law enforcement officers circulated widely on X. People sharing the videos said the man’s name was George Zinn.

Zinn was initially taken into custody, authorities said, but he was released and charged with obstruction by police.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Zinn disrupted events in the past and has a criminal record dating to the 1980s. Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill told the newspaper that Zinn was often arrested “on suspicion of trespassing” and was “politically conservative, leaning libertarian”.

Michael Mallinson, a 77-year-old Canadian man, was not the shooter

An image of a different bald man also went viral.

An X post with more than 992,000 views said, “The assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk was allegedly carried out by Michael Mallinson, a member of the Utah Democratic Party, Fox News reported”.

That claim was unfounded.

Mallinson said he is a 77-year-old retired banker “who lived and was in Toronto”, The New York Times reported after interviewing him. The rumour may have originated from an X account impersonating a Fox broadcast affiliate, The Times reported.

The fact-checking website, Lead Stories, found that the image was posted in 2020 on X by an account with Mallinson’s name. That account was unavailable on September 11.

A meme has been recycled for almost a decade to push disinformation about the identity of mass shooting suspects in the US and abroad. The meme features a real-life comedian whose name and photos have repeatedly been used by internet hoaxers. Once again, after Kirk’s death, the meme circulated on social media.

“Charlie Kirk shooter and Palestinian sympathizer Sam Hyde identified as shooter,” said a September 10 X post showing an image of a man with a rifle.

Another X post on Wednesday shared a video of the same man with a gun and footage of him shooting outdoors. The caption said: “Video of Charlie Kirk shooter now surfaces after the incident and the shooter is identified as Samuel Hackmann. Watch as he warns about the devastation he will be causing.”

The video and images show Samuel Hyde, now 40, a comedian. One of the images of Hyde with a rifle is from a 2016 YouTube video that has been removed.

The video in the X post was originally posted on Facebook in 2020 with the caption, “self-defense situation”, and it is not related to the Kirk assassination.

Video of a gunman ‘escaping’ is from July in Nevada

On Thursday, an X user shared a video saying it showed “Charlie Kirk’s real shooter escaping after the shooting”. The post gained 9.5 million views.

But a reverse image search showed the video was taken from a different incident that happened in July, and in another state.

At least 51 people have been killed during violent anticorruption protests in Nepal this week, and thousands of prisoners who escaped during the chaos remain on the run, according to police, as the country’s former Chief Justice Sushila Karki appears set to be appointed interim prime minister.

Police spokesperson Binod Ghimire said on Friday that those killed so far this week included 21 protesters, nine prisoners, three police officers and 18 others, without elaborating. Another 1,300 people were injured as police fought to control crowds.

The announcement comes as political uncertainty engulfs the nation, with Nepal’s President Ramchandra Paudel and army chief Ashok Raj Sigdel preparing to meet later on Friday with Karki and a leading youth activist.

Ghimire added that more than 12,500 prisoners who escaped from multiple jails countrywide remain on the run. “About 13,500 prisoners had escaped – some have been recaptured, 12,533 are still at large.”

The dead included prisoners killed during or after their escape in clashes with Nepalese security forces.

Some of the fugitives have reportedly tried to cross into India, where scores have been apprehended by Indian border forces.

Nepal’s army, which has imposed a curfew, said that it had recovered more than 100 guns looted in the turmoil, with some protesters seen brandishing automatic rifles.

“Sushila Karki will be appointed interim prime minister,” a constitutional expert consulted by Paudel and Sigdel, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters news agency.

“They [Gen Z] want her. This will happen today,” the source added, referring to the “Gen Z” protesters whose name derives from the age of most participants.

Karki is “seen as an anticorruption voice, so she’s acceptable to a lot of the Gen Z groups that have been firing up this movement, because corruption has been a big issue,” said Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from the capital Kathmandu. “But while she’s popular with them, she’s not necessarily popular with other groups … so she’s seen as a consensus candidate.”

Karki’s appointment is likely to be formally made after a meeting at Paudel’s residence, rescheduled to Friday afternoon from an initial time in the morning, according to a Gen Z source involved in the talks.

McBride, however, said that uncertainty remains over whether Karki can serve as an interim prime minister if she’s not a member of parliament, adding that this raises the prospect of Nepal dissolving its parliament or even overturning its constitution.

“But what is for sure is that Nepal is in for a long period of political uncertainty,” McBride said.

The president’s office and the army spokesperson did not respond to a request from Reuters for comment.

On Monday, the 21 protesters were killed in a police crackdown on demonstrations against a government ban on social media, corruption and poor governance.

On Tuesday, protesters set the parliament ablaze, KP Sharma Oli resigned as prime minister, and the army then took charge of the streets.

Wedged between India and China, Nepal has grappled with political and economic instability since the abolition of its monarchy in 2008, while a lack of jobs drives millions to seek work in other countries and send money home.

Shops began reopening on Friday, among signs that normalcy was returning in Kathmandu, with cars in the streets and police personnel taking up batons instead of the guns they carried earlier in the week.

Some roads stayed blocked, though streets were patrolled by fewer soldiers than before.

Authorities began handing the bodies of loved ones killed in the protests to mourning families.

“While his friends backed off (from the protests), he decided to go ahead,” Karuna Budhathoki said of her 23-year-old nephew, as she waited to collect his body at Kathmandu’s Teaching Hospital.

We thought returning home would end the nightmare.

After months of fleeing bombardment, sleeping in tents, schools, or under makeshift nylon sheets, many families finally walked back to their homes in northern Gaza during the fragile ceasefire in January 2025. The roads were lined with rubble. Our houses were broken shells, neighbourhoods unrecognisable. Yet we carried a fragile hope: that by stepping back onto our land, even among ruins, we were reclaiming our lives.

But as soon as we returned, the headlines followed us. Terms like “mass relocations”, “humanitarian cities,” and “population transfers” began to appear, suggesting that even after everything we had endured, our next destination might not be what remains of our homes, but military-controlled camps in the far south of Gaza, where the army had swept through and wiped out entire residential neighbourhoods, turning them into barren, flattened deserts.

For many outside Gaza, such reports read as distant political debates. For us, they land like threats. Each new statement feels like a draft of our next exile. The idea that the Israeli military might herd hundreds of thousands of us is terrifying precisely because we know what those “cities” would really be: overcrowded compounds, controlled checkpoints, food and water distribution under armed watch — if we are lucky enough to receive them — no freedom of movement, no guarantee of ever leaving.

Families who have just swept dust from their broken floors now whisper about whether they should keep bags half-packed, ready to flee once again. Children, who have barely adjusted to sleeping in their own beds after months away, overhear the word “relocation” and start crying. We all know what it means: another round of humiliation, another erasure of what little normal life we are trying to piece together.

Meanwhile, life in northern Gaza is already unbearably hard. Water and electricity are scarce. Food is overpriced and often unavailable. Families live among rubble, patching holes with nylon sheets. Yet even in these conditions, people cling to the dignity of being on their own land.

But that fragile dignity is overshadowed by the possibility that it could all vanish. Every attempt to rebuild — a repaired roof, a replanted garden, a reopened shop — feels provisional. Parents ask themselves: Should we invest in repairing the house if we may be forced out again? Students sit with books by candlelight yet wonder: What school will I graduate from if we are moved tomorrow? Every moment of normality feels as though it could be interrupted by soldiers demanding we leave.

What would it mean to live in these camps? The very thought keeps us awake at night.

We picture long queues for food, dependent on ration cards for every meal. We imagine tents lined in rows, stripped of privacy, where families huddle with strangers and women fear for safety in overcrowded conditions. We imagine soldiers controlling the gates, deciding who enters and who leaves, monitoring our lives with cameras and watchtowers.

For children, it would mean growing up without classrooms they know, without streets that carry their memories. Their “playground” would be a fenced dirt lot. For young men and women, it would mean the end of any chance at education or work; for, inside camps, life shrinks to survival. For the elderly, it would mean dying away from what remains of the houses and trees they planted with their own hands.

These are not abstract fears; they match what has already been documented in displacement zones and what legal experts predict. Analysts writing for JURIST and the Council on Foreign Relations note that once inside such camps, Palestinians would be unable to leave freely, their movements tightly monitored, their lives dependent on aid distribution. The United Nations agencies and NGOs have also warned that further mass relocations under military oversight could constitute forcible transfer.

The danger of these proposals is not only the physical hardship but the permanence they suggest. History has taught us that once people are forced into camps, “temporary” becomes long-term. A tent pitched “for now” becomes a marker of exile for decades.

That is why the fear today feels heavier than even the destruction we have endured. Bombs destroy cities, but forced relocation destroys roots. If we are pushed into these camps, it will not just be the loss of homes; it will be the loss of any claim to return.

Satellite imagery already confirms this danger is not theoretical. In Rafah, Al Jazeera’s Sanad agency documented the destruction of nearly 30,000 buildings between April and July 2025, providing evidence of land-clearing consistent with preparations for such a “humanitarian city”.

What makes this looming threat unbearable is the trajectory of our lives. We have already been pushed from hard to harder: from homes to schools, from schools to tents, from tents back to broken houses. And now, the plan being whispered is the hardest yet — military-run shelters that strip us of autonomy altogether.

What we really fear is not paranoia. It is a recurring project to erase us from our land. Some may wonder why the idea of relocation is more terrifying than the bombs we have survived. The reason is simple: bombs destroy walls, steal lives, but they do not sever us from our land. Forced relocation uproots us forever.

To lose a home is devastating. To lose the possibility of return is annihilating. That is why families whisper about the proposals with trembling voices. Because deep down, we know: once we are herded there, we may never see home again.

The world must see through the language being used. The term “humanitarian” is a mask. What is being proposed is not relief but imprisonment. What is being prepared is not shelter but a system of control designed to make displacement permanent.

If you read those headlines, do not imagine children playing safely in neat new towns. Imagine them staring through barbed wire, asking why they cannot go home. Imagine mothers queueing for a ration of flour under the eyes of soldiers. Imagine fathers pacing at night, unable to protect their families from the indignity of being treated as captives.

For us in Gaza, the worst may still be ahead. We returned home believing the nightmare was beginning to end. Instead, we live in the shadow of a new displacement, one that could erase even the ruins we call ours. This is the horror that defines our present: not only surviving bombardment, but living every day with the dread that the next chapter is already written, that the hardest chapter is still to come.