On the evening of April 25, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, allegedly fired gunshots outside the White House Correspondents’ dinner attended by US President Donald Trump.
While American law enforcement and the global press are trying to assess Allen’s motives and background, Pakistan-linked accounts on X are spreading conspiracy theories linking him to India.
One such account is Khorasan Ghag (@Khorasanghag_), a “journalist-run platform focused on militancy, terrorism, and counterterrorism”, which lists its location as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
The account claimed that “Indian Extremist Ideology” radicalised Allen. Allegedly, the US disciplinary immigration policies stalled Allen’s alleged wife, Priyanka Rao’s, citizenship during mandatory legal vetting, which led to the criminal act.
The account further asserted that Rao’s ideological association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was the reason behind Allen’s transformation into extremism.
Several Pakistani accounts shared an image of Allen with a woman whom they claimed was his wife, Priyanka Rao. They also shared a photo of her passport.
India Today Fact Check, however, found that the photo of Allen with his “wife” Priyanka is AI-generated — as is the passport. At the time of writing this, there were no reports about Cole Tomas Allen’s wife being Indian or him being married at all.
Photo of Allen’s alleged wife
We ran the image on the AI-detection tools Hive Moderation and ZeroGPT. Both tools confirmed that the image was AI-generated, with scores of 99.9 and 97 per cent.
Discrepancies in Rao’s Passport
The Hindi text on the passport is gibberish, with some Bangla also visible in places. Some of the other big discrepancies are as follows:
- The nationality field should have “India” written on it, but it says “Cole Thomas Allen”
- Tomas is misspelt as “Thomas”
- The passport of “Priyanka Rao” lists the spouse’s name as “Priyanka Rao” as well
We also confirmed using Google DeepMind’s SynthID detector that this fake passport was generated with Google Gemini.
Who is Cole Tomas Allen’s wife?
At the time of writing this, we did not find any report stating the would-be shooter was married, let alone that his wife is an Indian woman named Priyanka Rao.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Allen is a “Mechanical engineer and computer scientist by degree, independent game developer by experience, teacher by birth.” He got his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, in 2017, and his master’s degree in computer science from California State University Dominguez Hills last May.
Allen worked as a part-time teacher at C2 Education, a tutoring service that offers testing prep for high school students. And according to C2 Education’s social media, he received a “teacher of the month” award from the company in December 2024.
No ‘Indian extremist ideology’
According to The New York Post, Allen sent a 1,000-word manifesto to his family ahead of the incident. In it, he stated, “I am no longer willing to permit a paedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” adding, “Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.”
The alleged manifesto stated his rules of engagement — who was a priority for attack and who wasn’t — and included references to model Christian behaviour and his rebuttals of it. He wrote: “Turning the other cheek when someone else is oppressed is not Christian behaviour; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”
The manifesto did not mention anything about India, Allen’s wife, or her purported immigration issues, as claimed by the Pakistan-linked accounts.
In fact, while commenting on the lack of security he faced, Allen allegedly wrote: “Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again. Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce (M2 machine gun) in here and no one would have noticed shit. Actually insane.”
Thus, it’s clear that the viral claims about Cole Allen’s India connections have no basis.
– Ends
