Refiling to correct broken link

Emma Tustin, a British woman convicted of murdering her six-year-old stepson Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, is alive, and claims about her death in a British prison are fake.

The false claim has spread across social media (here , here).

Tustin was sentenced in December to a minimum of 29 years in prison, and her partner, Thomas Hughes, was sentenced to 21 years for manslaughter (here).

At trial, the jury heard how the boy had been poisoned with salt, as well as being beaten and starved in the weeks before his death in June 2020 (here).

Tustin is now imprisoned in HMP Peterborough in Cambridgeshire (here).

Since then, social media posts have claimed the 32-year-old was killed by a fellow inmate.

“Emma Tustin has been found dead in her cell after ben [sic] attacked by a wing cleaner who is also a prisoner. reports suggest she has been stabbed over 20 times with an [sic] homemade prison knife,” one post on Facebook said.

However Sodexo, which runs HMP Peterborough, told Reuters that this was not true.

This is not the first time a false claim about Tustin’s wellbeing has been circulated. Earlier in December, Facebook users falsely said she had been admitted to hospital after being forced to eat packets of salt (here).

VERDICT

False. HMP Peterborough is operated by Sodexo, which said claims that Tustin had been attacked and killed were false.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.

Read Full Story: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-britain-tustin-idUSL1N2TG0CU