Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We started the day unpacking an AI-generated picture which has been used to make false claims that the Bondi Beach shooting was staged. We’ve explained how we know it’s a fake and spoken to the man whose image was used to make it.

As part of our continuing verification around what happened on Sunday we also verified new dashcam footage revealing how two bystanders tried to stop the attack.

Ukraine says it used an underwater drone to attack a Russian submarine in the Black Sea. Watch the dramatic footage here and you can also read analysis from experts the team has spoken to about the attack.

In the UK, Reform deputy leader Richard Tice has said the government is paying for children with special needs to attend schools which are “charging more than Eton”. Our fact-checkers have examined the details behind the claim.

That’s all from BBC Verify Live for today, we’ll be back tomorrow.

Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist

Image source, X

We’ve been looking at posts on social media of flooded streets and camps in Gaza following Storm Byron which made landfall at the end of last week.

In a clip that we’ve verified fast-running water is seen flowing down a street of market stalls, shops and apartment buildings.

At one point, a piece of wooden furniture is swept down the street as market vendors try to stop it while protecting their own stalls. As the camera pans down the street a building with distinctive windows comes into shot which we could match to older photos on Google Maps.

This meant we could confirm the footage was taken at the Beach vegetable market in the al-Shati camp area on the northern coast of the Gaza Strip.

After carrying out reverse-image searches on a selection of still frames from the video we could confirm it appeared online for the first time today.

Shayan Sardarizadeh
BBC Verify senior journalist

A fake image that purports to show the “leaked” Facebook profile of one of the Bondi beach shooters has been widely shared online to spread a false claim he was a Jewish man from Israel.

The caption does not name the attacker it supposedly shows, Naveed Akram, but the account does use images of him which have been edited to show him wearing a kippah, a religious head covering worn by many Jewish people.

“His real name is David Cohen and he’s JEWISH, FROM ISRAEL,” the caption adds.

The image, which has racked up millions of views on Instagram and X, has a caption that claims it shows the Facebook profile of one of the two attackers “before it got deleted”.

BBC Verify has established that the image is fake, featuring several spelling and layout errors that are incompatible with genuine Facebook profiles.

These include the phrase “add a new friends” in the about section and illegible buttons such as “eeopis” and “ernsage”, which indicate generative AI may have been used to create the fake profile.

We ran a search for the name David Cohen on Facebook and found no profile matching the one in the false posts.

There’s no evidence that the two shooters, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, were Jewish or from Israel. According to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, the attack appears to have been "motivated by Islamic State ideology".

Ben Chu
BBC Verify policy and analysis correspondent

At a news conference today Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice claimed private equity backed firms are making £300m to £400m a year in profits from running special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) schools.

There is no question that private equity companies are involved in the SEND sector.

The Liberal Democrats commissioned research from the House of Commons Library, external this year into five major private SEND education providers: Outcomes First Group, Aspiris, Witherslack Group, Cavendish Education and CareTech.

Most of these are private equity-backed and the research pointed to collective operating profits for these groups alone of more than £100m a year and profit margins in some cases of more than 20%.

An earlier investigation by the specialist publication Schools Week, external into these same groups in 2023 found similar results.

However, most of these groups also run private children’s homes and it’s difficult to disentangle the profits made specifically from SEND education.

All the firms have denied profiteering.

Thomas Spencer
BBC Verify journalism researcher

We’ve asked experts to assess the likely impact of a reported Ukrainian underwater drone attack on a Russian submarine in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

As we reported earlier footage posted by Ukraine’s security service shows an explosion beside a docked submarine.

Having reviewed the video and compared satellite imagery of the port from today and 16 September, experts from the intelligence analysis firm Maiar told us the submarine’s propellor or stern gear vital for the vessel’s propulsion will have likely been damaged.

Satellite imagery from Planet Labs shows that part of the dockside where the submarine was moored has been damaged. A second submarine seen in the footage has been moved to a different pier, the imagery shows.

Analysts from Janes, an open-source intelligence firm, also concluded the submarine will have been severely damaged - saying the boat is “sitting heavily at the stern”. The explosion will have “destroyed the propeller, hydroplanes and rudder”, they said.

The vessel’s width and distinctive white circular hatches at either end are consistent with a variant of Russia’s improved Kilo-class submarine which can be armed with Kalibr cruise missiles, a weapon used to attack Ukrainian cities.

Nicholas Barrett
BBC Verify researcher

Image source, PA Media

During a news conference this morning Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice said the government is paying for children with special needs to attend private equity-owned schools which are “charging more than Eton”.

Councils are obliged to assess and support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities, external (SEND) including school provision.

If there aren’t enough places in state-run SEND schools councils must pay for children to attend independent schools. Some of these are run by companies with links to private equity groups, external.

Sending a child to the private Eton College in Berkshire costs around £63,000 per year in fees, external.

The average cost of sending a SEND pupil to an independent special school is £62,000 per year, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, external.

But there are some extreme examples.

Figures obtained by an education expert through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests show Kent County Council spent £350,000 a year on one pupil and £200,000 on 10 others.

Sherie Ryder
BBC Verify journalist

We’ve been looking at footage on social media of a private jet crashing near Mexico City on Monday.Reports say 10 people were on board, including two crew, who all died in the crash.

A verified video, which appears to be from a CCTV camera, shows a plane appearing to dive behind buildings. In another clip from the same area we see flames and smoke rising close to a football pitch in San Mateo Atenco.

Footage filmed from the pitch pans around to several buildings that we were able to cross-reference on Google Maps. We carried out reverse-image searches which confirmed the footage was new as it first appeared online on Monday.

Looking at flight tracking site FlightRadar24 we could see the aircraft, which was reportedly a Cessna Citation III registered XA-PRO, had taken off from Acapulco at 11:41 local time (14:41 GMT) and was due to land at Toluca airport about 45km (30 miles) west of Mexico City. Flight-tracking shows the aircraft last flew the same route on Friday and the flight took 35 minutes.

The aircraft was less than 4km (2 miles) from Toluca when flight-tracking stops. It’s unclear what caused the crash and officials said an investigation is under way.

Paul Brown
BBC Verify senior journalist

Image source, Getty Images

Australian officials are investigating why the alleged gunmen who killed 15 people at a Jewish celebration on Bondi Beach on Sunday spent most of last month in the Philippines.

The Philippine authorities say they can't confirm reports that the father and son were given military-style training during their stay.

There's been a long-running Islamist insurgency in the south of the country and jihadist groups in the Philippines and Indonesia have pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State group (IS) since 2014.

ISEAP (Islamic State East Asia Province) was officially declared in July 2018 and has engaged in attacks ever since, including suicide bombings targeting churches, police and security personnel.

Perhaps its most significant activity was in 2017 to 2019, when militants from the IS-affiliated Maute group effectively took control of the city of Marawi in the southern Philippines prompting a declaration of martial law.

In recent years that branch has been much less active and has only claimed attacks sporadically.

As yet there has been no official IS claim for the Bondi attack.

Additional reporting by BBC Monitoring

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

We’re keen to hear what you think the BBC Verify team should be looking into.

We're interested in investigating claims you may've seen online in your social feeds. We're also keen to know if you've think an image may have been made using artificial intelligence to spread disinformation.

You can also get in touch with BBC Verify if you've got a question about how we verify video posted online or work with satellite imagery.

You can send your suggestions to the team here.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

We’ve been reporting on false claims that the Bondi Beach shooting in Australia was staged.

The false claim being shared included an AI-generated image which allegedly shows one of the real victims, Israeli lawyer Arsen Ostrovsky, having fake blood put on his face by a make-up artist.

We got in touch with Ostrovsky, whose head was grazed by a bullet during Sunday’s attack.

“I saw these images as I was being prepped to go into surgery and will not dignify this sick campaign of lies and hate with a response,” Ostrovsky told BBC Verify.

Lucy Gilder
BBC Verify senior journalist, reporting from Washington DC

Image source, Reuters

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to declare fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction”.

He told reporters yesterday the classification would “protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country”, adding “no bomb does what this is doing, 200 to 300,000 people die every year, that we know of”.

He did not provide a source for this figure but it is much higher than the official count of fentanyl-linked deaths in the US each year, more even than the overall number of overdoses reported.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a US government public health agency, provisionally reported, external42,233, external overdoses involving synthetic opioids including fentanyl in the year to April 2025., external There were 73,690 overall drug overdose deaths reported in the same period.

The CDC cautions that these figures “may not include all deaths that occurred during a given time period” because of the delays that can sometimes happen when determining a cause of death.

The most recent finalised data, external recorded 105,007 overall drug overdose deaths in 2023, a large proportion of which (72,776) involved synthetic opioids.

Both overall and fentanyl-linked drug deaths declined compared to the year before.

Shayan Sardarizadeh, Benedict Garman and Paul Brown
BBC Verify

We've been looking at new dashcam footage showing the early stages of Sunday's attack on a Hanukkah event on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia.

The video is filmed from a moving vehicle and shows a man in a purple shirt confronting one of the attackers, identified as Sajid Akram, next to a Hyundai Elantra hatchback and wrestling a firearm from him. Another bystander appears to be involved.

As the filming car passes, the shot switches to a rear view dashcam and we see a black and white flag draped across the windscreen of the Hyundai. The man in the purple shirt is still holding the weapon at this point.

BBC Monitoring's jihadist media correspondent Mina al-Lami has identified the flag as the “Uqab” banner, which is most commonly associated with Muslim jihadist groups, particularly the so-called Islamic State group (IS).

We have detected no signs of AI manipulation in the footage.

At the very end of the clip, we see the man in the purple shirt being shot, which was also captured in a longer video showing the majority of the attack as it unfolded.

The video below contains distressing content.

The footage then switches to a final aerial shot showing the bodies of the two bystanders lying next to the car. Australian media have identified them as Boris and Sofia Gurman.

We’ve been in touch with the person who uploaded the dashcam footage, who said in a social media post the media had "not fully reported on this courage" demonstrated by the couple.

Joshua Cheetham
BBC Verify journalist

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has released footage which it says shows an underwater drone attack on a Russian submarine in the Black Sea port of Novorossiysk.

In the video, several warships and at least one submarine can be seen docked in a harbour in the east of the city. An explosion is then seen in the water near one of the submarines.

In a post on Telegram, the SBU said it carried out the attack with an underwater “Sea Baby” drone in collaboration with Ukraine’s navy.

The SBU identified it as a Kilo-class submarine, which has been dubbed the “Black Hole” for its ability to evade detection by sonar. The statement added that the “submarine suffered critical damage and was actually put out of action” in the explosion.

Although the blast seen in the video is dramatic with a large plume of water rising into the air, it’s not clear whether a submarine has been hit. Russian authorities say none of their vessels have been damaged, according to TASS state news agency.

We’re speaking to experts to get their view about what the footage could show.

Thomas Copeland
BBC Verify Live journalist

An AI-generated picture - which we should warn you shows a man with a bloodied face - is being used to make false claims that the Bondi Beach shooting was staged, including social media posts seen more than 10 million times.

The fake picture appears to show one of the victims of the attack having fake blood put on by a make-up artist on what appears to be a film set next to a beach.

The man sitting on the ground resembles Arsen Ostrovsky, an Israeli lawyer who was grazed in the head by a bullet and shared pictures of his injuries on social media.

This fake image has been used in hundreds of posts across social media platforms to claim that the shooting was a so-called “false flag” attack, but there are clear signs this picture is AI-generated.

We know from an interview Ostrovsky did with Australia’s 9 News TV that his t-shirt said United States Marines on it, with a Marines logo in the centre. As is common for AI generators, this design has been scrambled in the fake image.

The fake picture shows a large bloodstain at Ostrovsky’s neckline, but there is no matching bloodstain in the TV interview.

Elsewhere in 9 News’ live coverage we can see an injured Ostrovsky wearing shorts, but in the AI picture he is wearing jeans.

If you look at the top of the fake image, many of the hands of the apparent crew members are deformed, as is the car in the background. Many social media posts have used a cropped version of this fake photo with the top section removed.

Clicking here to read my reporting yesterday on the fake news website spreading false claims about the “hero” who wrestled a gun from one of the attackers.

Rob Corp
BBC Verify Live editor

Good morning from the live page team at BBC Verify.

We’ve seen more examples of misinformation and AI fakery being posted online following Sunday’s shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney that killed 15 people at a Hanukkah event. We’re looking at how artificial intelligence was used to back-up false claims about the attack.

Ukraine says its forces have attacked a Russian submarine at a port in the Black Sea using an underwater drone. Footage released by Ukraine’s security services shows an explosion at the docks in Novorossiysk, but the Russians say no vessels were damaged. We’ll show the footage to experts to get their take on what happened.

US President Donald Trump said last night that he is declaring the synthetic opioid drug fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction”. We’ve been looking into the official figures for fentanyl-related deaths in the US.

We’ll bring you more on those stories shortly - and if you’ve seen a claim, picture or video online that doesn’t seem right then get in touch with us here.