Autopsy reveals a Wuhan doctor was murdered in his sickbed.
The claim originated from an article published by City News (ab-tc.com) on February 8, 2020, titled "BREAKING: Autopsy reveals Wuhan Doctor didn\t die of coronavirus; he was murdered in sick bed - China Hubei News" (archived here). It opened:, An autopsy supervised by the Chinese Police has revealed that Li Wenliang, a doctor who tried to warn the world about the coronavirus outbreak was murdered., News broke out that the doctor died after contracting the virus while treating patients in Wuhan. His death sparked widespread of public anger and grief in China which called for an independent autopsy to be conducted., "A statement by the police says six heath care officials have been arrested in connection with the doctors death.", , Users on social media only saw this:, The doctor was murdered., The story made a bold claim that Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor who had warned about the threat of the new coronavirus, was murdered in his hospital bed. However, the article does not attribute this claim to any official source, and no other media outlet is reporting this development., CBS News reported that Li, 34, "died from the coronavirus illness early Friday," on February 7, 2020., The City News site fabricated a quote from a made-up individual, David Shangfen. It said Shangfen "told the press" he suspected something was wrong, but ab-tc.com is the only site on the Internet with that exact quote. A Google search revealed only one result:, , "The article did lift a quote from a BBC article that interviewed Lis father, but that comment had nothing to do with the allegation he was murdered:", "I dont think he was rumour-mongering. Hasnt this turned into reality now? My son was wonderful.", NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalists to rank the reliability of websites, describes ab-tc.com as:, According to NewsGuard, the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here., News-ap.org appears to be part of a network of sites strongly resembling other ones from a Ghana-based fake news network Lead Stories exposed in April 2018., These sites all engage in behaviour that is very similar to sites in the old network:, By itself, each of these individual methods is not enough to make the connection. But all of them taken together strongly suggest it is the same person or persons., We wrote about ab-tc.com before. Here are our most recent articles that mention the site:, See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:, Lead Stories is working with the CoronaVirusFacts/DatosCoronaVirus Alliance, a coalition of more than 100 fact-checkers who are fighting misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more about the alliance here., "Ryan Cooper, a staff writer and fact-checker for Lead Stories, is the former Director of Programming at CNN International, where he helped shape the networks daily newscasts broadcast to more than 280 million households around the world. He was based at the networks Los Angeles Bureau. There, he managed the team responsible for a three-hour nightly program,\xa0Newsroom LA.", "Formerly, he worked at the headquarters in Atlanta, and he spent four years at the London bureau. An award-winning producer, Cooper oversaw the networks Emmy Award-winning coverage of the uprising in Egypt in 2011. He also served as a supervising producer during much of the networks live reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, for which CNN received an Edward R. Murrow Award.", Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, deceptive or\n      inaccurate stories (or media) making the rounds on the internet.\n      \n      Spotted something? Let us know!., Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, deceptive or\n        inaccurate stories (or media) making the rounds on the internet.\n        \n        Spotted something? Let us know!.
Fake News: Autopsy Did NOT Reveal Wuhan Doctor Was Murdered In Sickbed | Lead Stories