Fact check: No axe attack at Düsseldorf Airport

Claim: "Man with axe in Düsseldorf airport," writes one user on a video that has been viewed more than 6 million times on TikTok. It shows a man with an object in his hand hitting monitors at an airport check-in counter. Bystanders film the action.

In the comments and also in other posts, including on X and YouTube, some users make racist comments, including talking about "social parasites" or sarcastically referring to a "skilled worker" whose integration "the German people have messed up." Other postings claim that the scene is taking place at Dublin airport or Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.

DW Fact check: False

The video was not made in Düsseldorf, Dublin or Moscow. Instead, it shows an incident at Santiago de Chile airport in Chile.

The first step to find out more about the origin of the video was a reverse image search. We created stills of the video using the browser plugin InVid and did a reverse image search using Google Lens. We quickly came across posts and reports linking the video to an incident at Arturo Merino Benitez International Airport (SCL) in Santiago de Chile.

A search with the keywords of the airport and the incident leads us to further, detailed reports on the incident on August 28, including other perspectives on the events.

On closer inspection, it is not an axe but a hammer that the man is using. In the video, we also recognize the Spanish word "Salida" (exit) on a display board to the right of the check-in counter, which indicates an airport in a Spanish-speaking country.

In the same image section, a large, illuminated "B” can be seen, which marks the check-in area at the airport. We find this location, including the illuminated "B" and the check-in counters, in this Getty image, which was taken in May 2023.

The background to the incident is apparently that the man in the video started rioting at the counter out of anger at being sold a fake flight ticket. Local media reports quote an official from the prefecture of Santiago Oeste who confirms the incident: "During the afternoon, a person of Haitian nationality who had problems checking into a flight he had purchased realized that the flight was not going to take place." The case was reported to the local public prosecutor's office in Pudahuel. No persons are said to have been injured in the incident. A spokesperson for American Airlines also confirmed the incident to the Spanish newspaper Marca.

The act of vandalism documented in the video therefore clearly did not take place in Düsseldorf, but in Santiago de Chile.

Saad Said Abubakar contributed to this article.