Two days after the Annecy attack, which left six seriously injured, including four young children, theories flourished on social networks.
Where does the intox come from?
Two days after the Annecy attack, which left six seriously injured, including four young children, theories flourished on social networks. On Twitter and Tik Tok, in the community of Christians in Syria and Iraq, we could read that the assailant, named Abdalmashi H., a Syrian Christian refugee in Sweden, would in fact be a Muslim. And would actually be called, according to them, Selwan Majd.
A rumor quickly picked up by several influential far-right accounts. In France, the Riposte laïque site explains for example that the assailant “had gone to Turkey with false papers where he met a Swedish tourist, and made her believe that he was a Muslim who had converted to Christianity”.
Why is this wrong?
First, solicited by Desintox, Internet users from the community of Eastern Christians, at the origin of the rumour, fail to justify their sources.
Then, the story that Riposte laïque draws from it contains factual errors. In fact, when Abdalamasih H. meets his wife in Turkey, she does not yet have Swedish nationality, since she is from Syria. According to the Swedish Migration Board, she obtained Swedish citizenship in 2021.
Above all, the theory of false papers does not stand the test of verification. Because journalists had access to the family of the suspect – this is the case of Le Point, which contacted several of his relatives in Syria and Sweden. With Desintox, the reporter from Le Point confirms that the assailant comes from a Christian family and that his father and mother bear the same name as him, the one now known to the authorities.