Video from Florida copter crash used in false claims about Nigerian banker’s death
- Published on February 13, 2024 at 09:46
- 4 min read
- By Tonye BAKARE, AFP Nigeria
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“CEO of Access Bank, Herbert Wigwe and 4 others. The chopper crashed onto Interstate 75 near Naples around 3:15 p.m. ET, according to the Federal Aviation Administration (sic),” reads a post shared on February 10, 2024.
Shared more than 200 times, the post also claimed the aircraft collided with a vehicle during the crash.
The post includes a photo of Wigwe as well as 19 seconds of footage showing the burning wreckage of an aircraft near a highway while a helicopter hovers above.
Other X accounts shared the same video and another version of it (here and here). The clip also circulated on Facebook (here and here).
Crash kills Wigwe
Wigwe, CEO of Nigeria’s Access Holdings group, died when a helicopter he was in crashed in Nipton, a community in San Bernardino county in California on February 9.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said all six people on board the flight, including two crew members, were killed (archived here).
US media reported that Wigwe’s wife, son and Abimbola Ogunbanjoa, a former chair of Nigerian Exchange Group, were also among the victims (archived here).
Access Holdings group later confirmed the deaths.
“The entire Access Family mourns the loss of Herbert, Doreen and Chizi,” the bank’s secretary Sunday Ekwochi said in a statement on February 11, 2024 (archived here).
However, the claim that the video showed the crash site where Wigwe and his family died is false.
Florida accident
To verify the claim, AFP Fact Check took a screenshot of the clip in the claim and carried out a reverse image search.
We found that several major US news outlets published the video on February 10, 2024.
In a broadcast posted on its official YouTube channel, NBC said that the video showed the crash site of a “small private jet” in Florida (archived here). Two people reportedly died in the accident.
Voice of America also covered the incident in Naples and shared a photo of the same burning wreckage seen in the NBC report (archived here). It credited the Associated Press as the source of the photo.
AFP and the Associated Press also published the user-generated video credited to @JobaRobinson by NBC.
According to the United States Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), the aircraft involved in the Florida crash was a Bombardier Challenger 600 jet (archived here). Wigwe travelled in a Eurocopter EC 130 helicopter.
The FAA also noted that the Florida accident occurred at around 3:15 pm local time while Wigwe’s crash happened at about 10 pm in California.
Florida and California are in different time zones, with the former three hours ahead.
Moreover, the video seen in the misleading claim was shot in the daytime and not at night.
Inconsistencies
AFP Fact Check spotted other discrepancies between the misleading clip and the actual crash, which killed Wigwe.
Four seconds into the footage circulating on social media, the tail of the burning aircraft can be seen. The shape of the tail is different from that of the helicopter in which Wigwe was travelling before the accident.
According to aviation authorities, there had been rain and sleet at the time of the crash in California. The weather in the misleading clip was clear and bright.
The San Bernardino Sheriff said that the site of the crash was “determined to be approximately one-quarter mile east of Interstate 15, near Halloran Springs Road” (archived here).
That is contrary to the online claim that it happened on Interstate 75 in Florida.
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