Video of London knife incident is from 2021, not 2023

Published on November 9, 2023 at 13:51
2 min read
By Tendai DUBE, AFP South Africa

A number of young men have been sentenced for machete-related crimes in the United Kingdom in the past few years. In this context, a video has circulated on social media with claims it shows a man recently arrested carrying a machete on a London bus. However, this is misleading: although the video of the incident is genuine, it was filmed in 2021 when a teenager was arrested for carrying a large “Rambo knife”.

“Police arrest a man with a machete on a London bus yesterday,” reads the Facebook caption. A video that was shared with the post on August 19, 2023, has continued circulating, notably in the UK and South Africa, garnering more than a million views.

The 15-second clip shows a parked red double-decker bus. As the doors open, three armed police officers step out, one of them wearing blue latex gloves and holding what appears to be a machete. Just as the clip is about to end, a suspect is briefly seen being escorted off the bus.

A screenshot of the misleading Facebook post, taken on November 6, 2022

Some of the comments in the post seem to believe the video was filmed recently, as evident from the high number of replies in November 2023.

Knife ban

A spate of knife crime led the UK government to ban machetes and “zombie knives” in August 2023, in a bid to crack down on street violence.

A zombie knife is described in the legislation as “a blade with a cutting edge, a serrated edge, and images or words that suggest that it is to be used for the purposes of violence” (archived here).

A government statement said that the maximum penalty “for the importation, manufacturing, possession and sale of these newly proscribed weapons will also be increased from six months to two years” (archived here).

Recent incidents involving the use of machetes include the murders of a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old in 2021 (archived here and here).

On October 8, 2023, a 27-year-old man in Grimsby, UK was arrested and charged with two counts of possessing an offensive weapon after reports of a man carrying a machete (archived here).

In November, a man in Slough was sentenced to a year and nine months in jail for threatening another man with a machete earlier in 2023.

However, claims that the video shows a machete-related incident in 2023 are misleading.

Rambo knife

AFP Fact Check performed a reverse image search on the video using the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify. This led us to the original footage, which was shared on YouTube in 2021 (archived here).

At the time, the UK tabloid The Mirror and a London news site owned by the same publisher both published the footage (archived here and here).

The articles reported that a 17-year-old was arrested on a bus in Brixton on July 26, 2021, for carrying a large “Rambo knife”.

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail