Anti-Muslim posts misrepresent old footage of lightning-sparked Canadian church fire
- Published on August 11, 2026 at 17:11
- 3 min read
- By Gwen Roley, AFP Canada
A dramatic video of a Quebec church in flames has resurfaced online in social media posts falsely claiming it shows a 2026 blaze sparked by a Muslim immigrant to Canada. But the fire took place in July 2025 and was caused not by arson, but a lightning strike that ignited the building, the local government confirmed.
"SHOCKING: Another church is burned down in Canada by Muslim immigrant," says an August 7, 2026 post sharing the video to X from an account called "Khan Fatima," which resembles a suspended profile that previously spread other false claims about immigrants starting church fires (archived here) .
The clip shows a fire engulfing a church spire, causing it to collapse.
Conservative US commentator David Harris Jr, who has also shared several false claims debunked by AFP, amplified the claim on Facebook and implied the fire had just taken place.
The video and screengrabs of it spread across Facebook, X, Instagram and Threads in several languages, including French, Spanish, Vietnamese and Haitian Creole. Some posts claimed the supposed arson was the result of "Islamization," while others called for a stop to alleged "Christian genocide."
AFP has repeatedly fact-checked similar misinformation about "Islamists" and migrants starting church fires in the United Kingdom and Canada.
Some August 2026 posts pushing the claim about "Islamist immigrants" burning a church misused different footage of a 2024 incident in Quebec -- an allegation that AFP previously debunked after officials ruled that fire an accident.
The video of the crumpling spire is similarly misrepresented.
Reverse image searches revealed that the clip is over a year old and shows the Église de l'Immaculée-Conception, which burned down July 17, 2025 in Saint-Ours, Quebec, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Montreal (archived here).
The city of Saint-Ours rejected the claim that the blaze was started intentionally by a Muslim immigrant.
"The fire was caused by a lightning strike during the severe thunderstorms that hit the region that evening" Saint-Ours general director Pascale Dalcourt told AFP in an August 10, 2026 email (archived here).
A Saint-Ours press release and news reports from the time further confirm that lightning started the fire (archived here and here).
Dalcourt also shared a screenshot of a weather map showing the observed lightning activity from July 17, 2025, with a strike blasting the church's former location at the center of town (archived here).
Several Canadian churches have suffered serious damage from fires since 2021, with the most recent incident taking place in April 2026 at a deconsecrated structure in Saint-Romain, Quebec (archived here and here).
Multiple fires were reported following the 2021 revelation that ground-penetrating radar detected possible human remains at the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, one of several Catholic boarding schools set up a century ago in Canada to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children (archived here and here).
A CBC News investigation found 33 churches had burned down between May 2021 and December 2023, with only two ruled accidental. Fourteen of those fires took place on reserves and in First Nations.
Data from Statistics Canada shows a peak of 155 police-reported hate crimes targeting Catholics in 2021, but it does not indicate that Christians have been the main target of such offenses in recent years.
In 2025, the government agency reported that about 3 percent of religiously motivated, police-reported hate crimes in Canada targeted Catholics, while 71 percent were directed at Jews and 18 percent at Muslims (archived here).
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.
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