Fake report of van and truck drivers ramming into Muslim street prayers shared online

False reports that van and truck drivers have rammed into Muslim street prayers in incidents in London and Cardiff alongside photos of the emergency services have been circulating online.

The posts on Facebook, which have gained thousands of reactions, say: “CLASHES EXPLODE IN BRITAIN’S STREETS: Van & Truck Drivers RAM INTO MUSLIM STREET PRAYERS — PUBLIC ORDER VS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM WAR ERUPTS.”

The posts claim that “every second” of the incidents was captured by people on their phones, and footage is “spreading like wildfire”.

The social media posts don’t specify where this happened, but two of the posts’ authors link to almost identical articles in the comments which appear to be presented as news reports, detailing supposedly recent incidents in London and Cardiff where “drivers confront blocked traffic with force”.

But there’s absolutely no evidence that the incidents described took place, and we couldn’t find any footage of them being shared online.

Images shared alongside the reports are either old and unrelated or almost certainly created with artificial intelligence.

One version, which includes text over a composite of two images saying “BREAKING” and “THIS JUST HAPPENED”, features a picture from 2021, showing a hijacked bus on fire in Belfast, with police vehicles in the background.

A second image included with this post, which seems to show Muslim women praying in front of a burning bus, has many hallmarks of AI generation, including the faces and bodies of people in the crowd being distorted, and errors in the rendering of the fingers of the praying women.

Another post making the same claims also uses the Belfast image, as well as a picture from Liverpool taken after former Royal Marine Paul Doyle drove into over 130 people at Liverpool FC’s victory parade in May 2025.

An inset image of a police officer in low light was taken from an old incident similar to the one described in the posts. Using reverse image search tools we traced it to a 2017 attack on a crowd of people outside a mosque in Finsbury Park in London, which killed one person and injured nine others. The man responsible for the attack, Darren Osborne, was from Cardiff.

Another photo from the aftermath of the 2025 Liverpool parade attack was also included with a different version of the post, which has been shared almost 500 times on Facebook.

Before sharing content like this which you may come across on social media, it’s important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and reliable source. Our Full Fact toolkit contains tips on how to do this, and guides on spotting misleading images and AI content.