Digital Affairs Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski said ministry officials met overnight with a disinformation response team.
“We are observing heightened activity in the duplication of false and unverified information. Every such item is reported, and Polish services are working to extinguish false narratives”, he said on X.
A masked 24-year-old drove onto Kraków’s main square on Saturday and opened fire, killing six and wounding 16, including two police officers and himself. He was arrested after an exchange of fire with police.
Prosecutors opened a terrorism investigation on Sunday, saying evidence showed he also killed three people in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski, identified as his parents and sister. The government declared November 8 and 9 days of national mourning.
Police response
Among the first false claims was that police were absent or late. Tomasz Sakiewicz, editor-in-chief of Republika, said while reporting from the scene that police were not there because “probably all of its reserves were taken to Warsaw”.
PAP said a plain-clothes officer wearing a police emblem stood directly behind him during the broadcast.
Regional police rejected the claim.
“Officers began intervening IMMEDIATELY. The first patrol began operations just 23 seconds after the report”, they said on X.
Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said police fired the first shots at the attacker three minutes after the report.
Doctored images
PAP found that several widely shared images purporting to show the attacker’s face had been altered with Google AI, using the SynthID detection tool. They were based on real video stills showing the wounded suspect.
Gawkowski warned that such sharpened images often mislead. “Passing on such images and commenting on them is an undesirable action that reinforces disinformation”, he said.
A Facebook photo of the suspect was also edited to add a badge with three arrows, a symbol of the anti-fascist movement, which he was not wearing in the original.
False leads
A post on X claiming that a man shown in Instagram screenshots was the attacker’s brother drew nearly 2 million views. The man said the post was a “provocation by foreign bloggers who wanted to gain popularity”.
Another post, which reached a million views, alleged a second attacker was on the roof of St. Mary’s Basilica. Regional police said officers were responding to a priest who had stepped onto a terrace, and there was no information of a second attacker.
Soldier claim
Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said the attacker was not and never had been a soldier in the Polish army.
Michał Marek, an expert at research institute NASK, said the claim was also circulating in Russian and Belarusian information spaces, citing a supposed defence ministry confirmation.
“The Russians will most likely try to promote this message internationally as well, thereby deprecating the image of the Polish army”, he said.
(jh)
Source: PAP