Original article (in Bosnian) was published on 12/01/2023
In reporting on Andrew Tate’s arrest, several local media reported that police had located him because of the writing on the pizza boxes.
On December 30, 2022, the web portal Index published an article with the following title:
Police found Tate thanks to Greta Thunberg and a box of pizza
The article discusses the fact that Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer and influencer known for his misogynistic attitudes, was arrested in Romania on suspicion of participating in human trafficking.
Index says that the video that Tate posted on his Twitter account helped the Romanian police to discover his whereabouts.
CONTROVERSIAL influencer Andrew Tate was arrested in Romania on Thursday after he accidentally revealed his whereabouts to everyone in a video in which he insulted the Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, and was betrayed by a pizza box.
A few days ago, Tate attacked Thunberg on Twitter, and after Greta mocked him, he published a video in which he further insulted her and made a cardinal mistake. Tate, who is wanted by the police on charges that he participated in a criminal group for human trafficking and sexual exploitation of women, at one point in the video asks for a pizza to be brought to him, and it turned out to be Jerry’s pizzeria, which operates in the Bucharest area.
The police knew that Tate had a residence in the Romanian capital, but he hid skillfully and they were never able to find him there, and they had no idea that Tate was in Romania at the time. But the pizza gave him away and the police quickly raided his residence.
Another 30 local-language web portals published articles claiming that Tate was located because the labels on the pizza boxes revealed his whereabouts to the police.
The claims were also viral in posts on social networks, namely private profiles of Facebook users (1, 2, 3).
What are the facts?
Andrew Tate was arrested with several other people in Romania, where he was sentenced on December 30, 2022, on suspicion of involvement in human trafficking, rape and organising a criminal group.
Shortly after this news was published on social networks, there were reports that the pizza box from the video he posted two days earlier led to the discovery of the location and arrest.
In the analysis published on January 6, 2023, AFP states that such theories, according to which the pizza boxes may have led to the arrest, were advocated on Twitter by a professor from Harvard, as well as by the American media.
The fact is that investigative authorities in Romania already knew where Tate was, which they confirmed in a statement to AFP.
The Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), Romania’s anti-mafia prosecutor who investigates human trafficking, said the theory was wrong.
“It is not related”, spokeswoman Ramona Bolla told AFP on December 30.
“To determine whether a person is in the country or not, we use several means. The fact that he posted a video that night showing a box of Jerry’s pizza would only confirm what we already knew”.
She added that search warrants were already in place when Tate released the footage.
AFP also states in the same analysis that the tweet posted by Greta Thunberg on December 30, 2022, after Tate was arrested with the message “this is what happens when you don’t recycle pizza boxes” was just a joke. Also, the analysis points out that Tate himself posted on Twitter that he was in Romania.
A spokesperson for Greta Thunberg told AFP that the activist’s tweet about recycling pizza boxes was a “joke” and that she had “not been in contact with the Romanian authorities”.
The video was also not the first indication that Tate was in Romania. On December 25, he tweeted a picture of a mountain landscape with the caption “Romania”.
Using geolocation techniques, AFP discovered that the video was taken above the Transfagarasan road in Romania.
Let us remind you that Tate in a tweet posted on December 28, 2022, addressed Greta, asking her for an e-mail address to send her a detailed list of his cars and their enormous consumption, to which she jokingly replied the same day that he could contact her at the address “smalldickenergy@getalife.com”.
A video showing pizza boxes was posted by Tate as a response to Greta’s joke. After he was arrested, Greta posted the aforementioned tweet, since Tate emphasized in the video that the cardboard pizza boxes are made of non-recycled material.
Therefore, all the available facts and the statement of the spokeswoman of the Directorate for the Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism in Romania indicate that Tate was arrested after a series of investigations and that the pizza boxes from the video had no influence on him being found.
Following the stated facts, we assess the claim that Tate was found because of the writing on the pizza boxes from the video he posted on Twitter, found in Index’s article as fake news.
We assess all subsequent publication of claims as the distribution of fake news.
