Does a viral image circulating on the internet show Belfast knife attack victim Steven Ogilvie with bloody slash marks and stitches on his face in the hospital? No, that's not true: Belfast police confirmed to Lead Stories that the man in the image is not Ogilvie, who was attacked in Belfast on June 8, 2026. A reverse image search found no results identifying the person in the image as Ogilvie or linking it to any Belfast incident.
The claim appeared in a June 10, 2026, post on X account @ianmiles (archived here). It opened:
This is a photo of the man who had his eye gouged out and was almost decapitated by a Sudanese migrant who exploited the asylum seeker loophole to gain entry into the UK. He is fighting for his life.
This is what the image looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @ianmiles on X.)
Ogilvie was attacked in Belfast on June 8, 2026, as Reuters reported (archived here).
Lead Stories contacted the Police Service of Northern Ireland and spokesperson Laura McMullen responded via email on June 10, 2026, confirming that the person in the image is not Ogilvie:
We acknowledge that the family of the attempted murder victim in north Belfast have called for privacy at this time. Despite this, we are aware of inaccurate images circulating claiming to be the victim after the attack. They are not related to anyone involved in the attempted murder. We believe these images are being used to arouse fear and hatred.
A reverse image search on Google (archived here) did not find any matching images that identified the person as Ogilvie nor any news reports that published the image, as this screenshot shows:
(Image source: Google search.)
