Fact check: Viral claim of Saudi crown prince assassination plot is false

A viral social media claim that Saudi authorities foiled an assassination plot targeting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is false, according to a fact check published by iVerify Pakistan.

The fact check found no credible evidence of any such incident and established that the individual identified in the posts as a member of the Saudi royal family does not exist.

The claim circulated on social media platforms X and Facebook from October 12, accompanied by an image purportedly showing the alleged assassin and a royal family member.

One post claimed that Sheikh Mubarak bin Nuwaf Al-Duaisi Al Saud had attempted a coup, suggesting that disagreements within the ruling family could lead to the crown prince's assassination. Another post alleged that Saudi intelligence had arrested the purported royal and several officers over a failed assassination attempt allegedly backed by Yemen's Houthi movement.

The posts attracted millions of views across social media platforms.

To verify the claims, iVerify Pakistan searched for reports from credible Saudi and international media outlets and conducted keyword searches in English and Arabic for the alleged royal's name. The searches found no credible reports of the purported assassination attempt or evidence that such a royal family member existed.

A reverse image search traced the face used in the circulated portrait to Iraqi YouTuber Ali Adel, who has no known connection to the Saudi royal family.

The fact check also examined the image using several artificial intelligence detection tools. Google's Gemini SynthID detector identified a digital watermark indicating that the image had been generated or edited using Google AI.

An AI-based facial-similarity analysis tool, Quantilence, found a 93.7% similarity between the circulated portrait and a screenshot of Adel taken from one of his YouTube videos.

Other detection tools also flagged the image as AI-generated. Sightengine assessed it as 73% AI-generated, while TruthScan and Undetectable AI each gave it a 99% AI-generated assessment.

Further searches found that the same claim had circulated on social media in March 2026, also without supporting evidence.

The fact check concluded that the claim of Saudi authorities foiling an assassination plot involving the crown prince and an alleged royal family member was false.

The fact check was originally published by iVerify Pakistan, a project of the Centre for Excellence in Journalism at the Institute of Business Administration and the United Nations Development Programme.