Benin, 2025 — military coup attempt

Sources show a minor discrepancy on exact date: Al Jazeera and AU press release date the coup announcement to December 7, 2025, while NPR's headline dates government regaining control to December 8, 2025 (consistent with the coup being announced late Dec 7 and suppressed within hours, spilling into Dec 8 reporting). This matches the dataset's recorded date of 2025-12-07. | Verified by fetching all six cited source URLs (Al Jazeera x2 facts, CNN, NPR x2 facts, AU press release), plus cross-checks on Wikipedia's "2025 Beninese coup attempt" article and TRT Afrika. Findings: 1) Facts 1, 2, 5, 6 (Al Jazeera x2, NPR/Talon address, AU press release) checked out cleanly — quotes are fair paraphrases of real, on-page text; the AU press release quote is an exact match. No changes. 2) Fact 3 (CNN) was a mixed claim: the "Seidou announced the coup foiled" portion is well supported (CNN's own URL is blocked by robots.txt, but an identically-headlined AP-wire copy of the same story on NPR-affiliate stations NEPM and OPB confirms Seidou's exact quote). However, "14 people were arrested" does NOT appear anywhere in that AP/CNN piece — I read the full article text and it contains no arrest count. That figure instead originates from a separate Reuters wire carried by TRT Afrika, attributed to an unnamed "government spokesperson," not to Seidou. I split this into two facts and re-sourced the arrest count to TRT Afrika (directly fetched and confirmed), removing the false attribution to Seidou. This is corroborated by Wikipedia's count (14 arrested, 12 active-duty + 1 dismissed). 3) Fact 4 (NPR) claimed "Nigeria providing fighter jets and ground troops at Benin's request." I fetched the NPR article directly and it ONLY mentions air force jets/airstrikes — no ground troops, no explicit "request" language. The ground-troops/request claim is true (confirmed via Wikipedia: two formal Beninese requests, Nigerian ground forces entered, later a Nigerian Senate vote to approve deployment, plus an ECOWAS multinational deployment) but was not supported by the cited NPR source. Split into a VERIFIED airstrikes fact (NPR) and a CHAIN ground-troops fact (Wikipedia). 4) Summary contained two claims with no corresponding sourced fact anywhere in the entry: "ECOWAS...and UN condemned the coup attempt" and the AU "threatening regional troop deployment" (the troop deployment was actually an ECOWAS action, not an AU threat, and neither ECOWAS nor UN condemnation was ever sourced in the facts list). Trimmed both from the corrected summary since only AU condemnation is fact-sourced in this entry. Net effect: no fact was fabricated from whole cloth, but two of the six original facts blended a verifiable detail with an unsupported/misattributed add-on, and the summary embellished beyond the sourced facts. Corrected via splitting/re-sourcing rather than outright removal, since the underlying claims are true and independently verifiable — but per the "downgrade if in doubt" instruction this cannot be marked CLEAN.