Police arrest suspect behind President Tinubu’s AI-generated voice note

The Nigerian Police Force has arrested Ifechukwu Dennis, the man alleged to be the originator of an AI-generated voice note that was widely circulated online as a leaked recording of President Bola Tinubu.

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Presidential Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, announced the arrest in a post shared on his official X account on Thursday, June 4.

“The IGP crack team has arrested Ifechukwu Dennis who originated the fake voice that he passed on to his gullible targets as President Tinubu’s voice. Dennis was arrested in Benin. The police will issue an official statement.”

The arrest closes a week-long controversy that began on May 27, 2026, when a video of social media activist Martins Vincent Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan (VDM), went viral. In the clip, an AI-generated voice resembling Tinubu’s was heard making inflammatory statements — including that insecurity in the South-East was deliberate, that he had pressured Peter Obi to step down ahead of the 2023 election, and that he was indifferent to Nigerians’ suffering.

Investigations by multiple news organisations, however, established that VDM never posted the doctored audio.

An unidentified individual had extracted footage from VDM’s original Instagram video and superimposed the AI-generated voice notes before recirculating the manipulated version online.