IN SHORT: Service delivery protests in and around Bloemfontein, South Africa in May 2026 did escalate into looting which targeted immigrants. However, one particularly dramatic image shared on social media - supposedly showing looters making off with a coffin and headstone - is an AI-generated fake.
On 25 May 2026, service delivery protests in and around the city of Bloemfontein in South Africa's Free State province escalated into opportunistic looting. The looting targeted stores owned by immigrants to South Africa, amidst increasing xenophobic rhetoric blaming migrants for issues like high unemployment rates and poor service delivery.
The Bloemfontein service delivery protests were organised by a group called the National Service Delivery Forum, or NSDF, although social media users have often conflated the looting with xenophobic protests organised by March and March. This is an anti-immigrant organisation that has also organised several public protests in 2026 and has been accused of fuelling "hostility and violence towards migrants" by several South African human rights organisations.
One particularly striking image, supposedly captured during the looting in Bloemfontein, shows a group of men carrying a coffin and a marble headstone past burning debris on a street. On social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and X, users claimed that this was a photograph taken in Bloemfontein, sometimes specifically in the suburb of Rocklands, an area which saw heavy looting. But this is false.
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While coffins have been stolen from funeral parlours during previous incidents of looting in South Africa, there is no record of such an event taking place in Bloemfontein in May 2026. The "photograph" is actually a convincing fake.
No evidence of coffins, headstones looted in Bloemfontein protests
In July 2021, protests against the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma escalated into looting and violence, particularly in the KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces of South Africa. Funeral parlours were targets of looting during those incidents, and South African police reported recovering stolen coffins, along with other items, in connection with that looting. So there is a precedent in the country for this kind of unusual crime.
However, there are no reliable reports of the looting of coffins or other items from funeral parlours during the Bloemfontein protests. Free State police spokesperson Thabo Covane told Africa Check: "Yes, shops were looted, but what you see there is an exaggeration."
So where did the image of the men with the coffin and headstone come from?
Background details visible in the image did not seem to match any areas where looting took place and no reliable news sources had shared the image. But a reverse image search did not turn up any instances of the image shared prior to the protests.
We ran this image through multiple tools trained to detect images generated with artificial intelligence (AI) and these returned inconclusive or zero evidence that the image was AI-generated. But these tools are fallible, and can get it wrong. So we looked closer.
Small, easy-to-miss details disobey laws of physics
Generative AI tools are capable of producing very convincing fake images. But they cannot perfectly mimic reality and AI-generated images typically include subtle errors and indications that an image is fake. In this case, the flaws are difficult to spot and minor enough that a single error on its own is not conclusive. But altogether, they provide enough evidence to confirm that the image is a fake.
AI-generated images often make subtle errors with perspective. To explain how, you first need to understand how perspective works in genuine photographs.
In a real photograph, lines that are parallel to one another - meaning they would never touch, no matter how far they were extended - appear to converge and connect at a point called a vanishing point. This point is not a physical part of the world but an illusion - it may lie outside the image. This optical illusion allows the human brain to see a flat surface, including a collection of pixels on a flat screen, as a collection of physical objects which are closer to or further away from the viewer.
Sunlight and shadows in photographs obey a similar principle. Because the sun is very far away from Earth, its rays appear parallel to one another. So lines connecting points on an object to the same points on its shadow should also appear to narrow to a vanishing point. The following image illustrates how both of these effects appear in a real photograph.
AI-generated images, on the other hand, are often not based on real physical locations or captured in real sunlight. So they often break these laws. In the image of the men with the coffin, shadows do not appear to converge, and parallel lines, such as the sides of the coffin, do not meet at a single vanishing point.
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Less subtle errors typical of AI
In addition to these quite subtle errors, there are more immediately visible mistakes in the image. For example, while the text on the headstone appears to begin with the Arabic word "lللّٰo" (Allah, or God), it quickly becomes garbled gibberish.
One side of the headstone is not a straight line and could not connect where it is obscured by a man's arm. There are also several instances where objects seem to overlap in impossible ways, such as where a man's head apparently intersects with part of the headstone.
Real photographs can be unclear or misleading. But here the many visual errors and the lack of any contextual details, connecting the image to a real place and time, make it overwhelmingly likely that the image is a fake.
For more advice on spotting AI-generated videos and images, see Africa Check's guides on the topic. But whether an image is AI-generated or not, when its origin and authenticity are unclear, the most responsible thing to do is not to share it at all.
