What was claimed
Greenwich council is set to remove a memorial stone to Lee Rigby.
Our verdict
When this article was originally written, Greenwich council told us they didn’t have plans to remove the stone. It has since been removed and replaced with an official memorial.
A post on Facebook reported that Greenwich Council plan to remove a memorial stone laid for Fusilier Lee Rigby, who was murdered in a terrorist attack in May 2013.
The stone was not the official memorial for Fusilier Rigby, which is located at a nearby church. The unofficial memorial was put in place in November 2018, when some members of the public reportedly removed a paving slab near the site where Fusilier Rigby was murdered and replaced it with a memorial stone.
The Facebook post was published in December 2018. Greenwich Council confirmed to us in January 2019 that it had no plans to remove the memorial stone. A Facebook live video from 24 January appeared to show the memorial stone intact.
Subsequently, in March 2019, Greenwich Council and the family of Lee Rigby made the decision to remove the unofficial memorials and install a new memorial close to the site of his murder.
Update 29 August 2019
At the time of writing, Greenwich Council told us it had no plans to remove the memorial stone and so we rated the Facebook post as “false”. In March 2019, Greenwich Council and the family of Lee Rigby made the decision to remove the unofficial memorials and install a new memorial close to the site of his murder. We have changed the rating to true and updated this piece to reflect the new information.
Correction 20 February 2020
This article originally said that Greenwich Council confirmed to us that the memorial stone would not be removed in January 2018. This has been corrected to read "January 2019".
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 true as the stone has now been removed by Greenwich council.
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