US far-right activist and commentator Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10 at an event at a Utah college. Following the announcement, social media users quickly circulated photos allegedly showing suspected perpetrators of the killing.
A 'member of the Utah Democratic Party'?
Hours after Wednesday’s shooting, a number of social media users claimed the shooter was a Democrat named Michael Mallinson.
“The assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk was allegedly carried out by Michael Mallinson, a member of the Utah Democratic Party, Fox News reported,” reads a post from September 10, which garnered more than 900,000 views (archive).
The post showed a video of Kirk and his family, along with a video clip of a police arrest of a balding white man with glasses. Multiple videos shared on social media show this man being led away by the police following the shooting, as a bystander screams: “How dare you? How dare you?”
The post also included a photograph of Mallinson, sitting on a sofa. Like the man in the video being led away by police, Mallinson is white, balding and wears glasses.
Contacted by the New York Times, Mallinson explained that he is a 77-year-old retired banker in Canada. He said he had been in his home city of Toronto on Wednesday, not in Utah, and that he had been receiving online threats after being misidentified. LinkedIn and Twitter accounts under his name also point to him residing in that city.
The rumour, according to the New York Times, originated from an X account named "Fox 11 Reno", whose post has since been deleted. Following this, numerous online users referenced "Fox News" as their source. However, a spokesperson for the group that owns the Nevada Fox affiliate told the New York Times that the account was "impersonating the station".
Mallinson is not the man seen being arrested in the video.
Fact-checking media outlet Lead Stories highlighted several physical discrepancies. For example, the man being led away by police has a chin dimple, a feature Mallinson lacks.
“I’m just shocked by it,” Mallinson told the New York Times. “How quickly it can happen, how one’s name and photo can get spread around quite quickly.”
He also said he received direct messages on Facebook, “calling him a ‘savage’, among other names”.
Utah media identified the man in the video as George Zinn, a local political activist. Utah state police determined that Zinn was not the gunman. He was released and charged with obstruction of justice.
While two people were detained in the first hours after the killing, the shooter responsible for the killing remained at large at the time of the writing of this article.
The FBI director Kash Patel said on September 10 – referring to another suspect – that “the subject for the horrific shooting … is now in custody", but he indicated less than 2 hours later that “the subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement".
A ‘transgender’ person?
However, Mallinson is not the only person to have been falsely accused of killing Kirk.
“A second suspect of Charlie Kirk’s political assassination has been identified by Twitter users and yes, it’s a transgender,” reads a X post viewed more than one million times.
It was posted by an account called @UBERSOY1, which identifies itself as a “creator of Right-Wing Progressivism.”
The post includes two images. The first one displays what looks like a Google search result for an individual, with a photograph of a person with long blond hair and cropped black T-shirt and what appears to be the name of an X account, “Omar (@NajraGalvz)”.
The second image contains a screenshot showing two posts from an X account with the same name and handle, but a different profile picture. The posts read: “Charlie Kirk is coming to my college tomorrow i rlly hope someone evaporates him literally … Lets just say something big will happen tomorrow.” Screenshots shared by other accounts include dates indicating the posts were published on September 9, 2025.
The handle @NajraGalv has changed ownership since the shooting, but screenshots and archives show that the user presented as a 17-year-old nonbinary person.
Unlinked photo
However, there is no evidence to suggest that the individual in the picture is connected to the Omar/@NajraGalvz account.
The image is actually the profile picture of another X account, @MKaylaUltra, which also has an associated Instagram account (archive). The bio for this account states the individual is a 29-year-old music producer who resides in Seattle, Washington and uses the pronouns “she/her".
In a series of Instagram stories, she clarified that the account that posted the death threats is not hers. In a message addressed to the FBI’s Seattle office, she explained that the account had retweeted one of her posts: “That retweet made my picture show up on Google. @fbi.seattle could we maybe make a statement that i’m not the shooter so these people don’t kill me,” she wrote.
In her story, “mmkaylaultra” also wrote that she has been “in Seattle Washington all day", and shared a screenshot of her location data, adding: “Location data has me in Seattle between 4 and 5pm. The shooting happened around noon in Utah (11am Washington). The university is a 13-hour drive from Seattle. It is physically impossible for me to have been in Utah yesterday.”
After the shooting, the Omar/@NajraGalvz account seemingly reacted to the incident. Several archives of the account, as well as screenshots shared on social media, show it wrote: “Charlie Kirk got shot bro I promise I didn’t have anything to do with it.” “But I called it and it’s so f------ deserved,” it also added.
The @NajraGalvzI handle now directs to an account named “Max”. The first post now reads: “I want to make this very clear – I am not the person responsible for those tweets going viral. The person with this username has changed their ID within the past few minutes, so I quickly nabbed it to prevent it being taken by someone with malicious or financial gain intentions. Violence, especially of this nature, has absolutely no place in society.”
English (US) · 