page_title: List of premature obituaries
section_title: A
hierarchical_section_title: List of premature obituaries / A
caption_attribution_description: Ali Hassan al-Majid, hearing in Baghdad, Iraq (Dec. 18, 2004)
context_page_description: A premature obituary is an obituary of someone who was still alive at the time of publication. Examples include that of inventor, businessman, and chemist Alfred Nobel, whose premature obituary condemning him as a "merchant of death" may have prompted him to create the Nobel Prize; black nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose actual death may have been precipitated by reading his own obituary; and actor Abe Vigoda, who was the subject of so many premature obituaries that a website was created to state whether he was alive or dead.
  People who were presumed to be dead, and joke death reports that were widely believed, are also included.
context_section_description: Alan Abel reported his own death in a skiing accident as an elaborate hoax on New Year's Day, 1980, to get his obituary published in The New York Times. Abel died on September 14, 2018.
  Ali Hassan al-Majid was supposed dead in April 2003, after British and United States officials reported that he had died in an air strike in Basra; al-Majid had been seen going into the building that was attacked, and corpses of his bodyguards were positively identified, though there was less certainty about the identity of al-Majid's supposed corpse. After obituaries of the Iraqi general, politician and first-cousin of Saddam Hussein were published in many newspapers, reports then circulated that he had escaped by boat, and subsequently been seen joking with staff in a hospital in Baghdad. Al-Majid was captured several months later, and sentenced to death in 2007 for war crimes. He was hanged on January 25, 2010.
  John Allen, a serial criminal, faked his own suicide by drowning off Beachy Head (Britain's most notorious suicide spot) in 1966 to escape prosecution for theft, presumably resulting in his being declared dead. He in fact swam around the coast, retrieved dry clothes that he had hidden, and took up a new identity. However, his crimes continued, including further thefts and bigamy. In 2002 he was jailed for life for having murdered his wife and children in 1975. He died in 2015.
  Rex Alston, a retired BBC sports commentator, garnered the unusual distinction of having his marriage announced in The Times the year after that paper had published his obituary, when his internal obituary file was updated and accidentally published in 1985. Alston was 84 at the time and lived another nine years until his actual death at 93 in 1994.
  Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi terrorist leader of ISIL was erroneously reported dead, injured or arrested numerous times over a number of years by various governments, in media, and on Wikipedia, before his death in 2019.
caption: Ali Hassan al-Majid (2004)
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