What was claimed
A video shows a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO) housing foreign men being burned down during recent disorder in Belfast.
Our verdict
This isn’t correct. The footage does not show the recent disorder in Belfast, but a separate incident that occurred in Ballymena in June 2025, a year prior to the recent violence.
A video of a property on fire is being shared with misleading claims it depicts recent disorder in Belfast, but it actually depicts events in Ballymena a year ago.
The clip was posted on Facebook on 9 June with the caption: “Houses are now being set on fire in parts of Belfast this evening.”
The post was shared amid days of violence in Belfast following a knife attack on a man, Stephen Ogilvie. A 30-year-old Sudanese man, Hadi Alodid, has appeared in court charged with attempted murder, along with other offences, and was remanded in custody.
The footage being shared shows people in the doorway of a property which is on fire, while a voice can be heard mentioning “foreigners”, and a smoke alarm goes off.
We found a different video of the same scene posted on X on 11 June 2025.
The same person shouting can be heard in both clips (the one circulating now, and the video posted in 2025), and we compared two angles of the inside of the burning property, and matched key features in both.
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The description with that X post attributed the footage to Ballymena, in Northern Ireland, which Full Fact matched to Google Street View images of the area. Several days of violence broke out there in June 2025 following a peaceful protest over an alleged sexual assault in the County Antrim town. This was a year prior to the most recent scenes of violence in Belfast.
We have also fact checked other examples of old or unrelated footage being shared with claims they depict disorder in the city. Misinformation can spread quickly during times of crisis, so it’s important to consider whether something you see online comes from a verifiable and trustworthy source before you share it. Our Full Fact toolkit contains tips to help you do this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because this is not footage from the recent disorder in Belfast, but a separate incident in 2025 in Ballymena.
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