Photo of burqa-clad man arrested in Pakistan misleads in posts about Afghanistan protests
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on October 12, 2022 at 11:20
- 3 min read
- By Wasi MIRZA, AFP Pakistan
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"Not a single protester has died due to the grief of the Hazaras, there are intelligent hands behind these demonstrations," reads a Pashto-language tweet published on October 3, 2022.
"This is an example in Herat where a man uses women's clothes to carry out the conspiracies of the enemies of Islam and the country. They have no shame!"
The tweet contains one image of what appears to be a man dressed in a burqa (left) and a second image of a woman being pulled by her hijab (right):
On October 2, 2022, authorities dispersed scores of women in Afghanistan's western city of Herat who were protesting against a suicide attack two days earlier that had killed dozens in the capital Kabul.
The attack targeted the women’s section of a gender-segregated study hall in a neighbourhood that is home to the historically oppressed Shiite Muslim Hazara community, AFP reported.
Other posts claiming the image of the burqa-clad man shows a protester in Herat were published on Twitter here, here, here and here, with nearly 100 shares between them.
However, the image has been shared in a misleading context.
Pakistan arrest
A reverse image search on Google found the photo was previously published in this report by Pakistan's Geo News on June 2, 2021.
"Lahore police arrest burqa-clad man from court," the report's title reads.
According to the report, police caught the man despite his attempts to evade arrest after his in-laws accused him of kidnapping their daughter.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the misleading posts (left) with the original from Geo News (right):
The incident was also reported by Pakistan's ARY News and G News Network (GNN), with additional photos showing the accused standing alongside police officers in Lahore.
"According to a Lahore police spokesman, a young man named Faraz had got married in Misri Shah, and the girl's parents had registered a kidnapping case against the accused," reads GNN's report.
"The accused said that he used the burqa to avoid arrest and opponents and seek interim bail in the case," the report continues.
Afghanistan protester
Scenes showing the woman in the image on the right-hand side of the posts, who is being pulled by her hijab, can be viewed in a video report on the protests by the BBC's Dari language service on Twitter here.
It was included alongside several other clips.
The tweet reads: "Dozens of female students demonstrated in Herat and Bamyan to protest the targeted killing of Hazaras and the deprivation of girls.
"This is perhaps the biggest women's march in the last year. "Silence is treason" "Education is our right" "Stop the genocide" were slogans of the protesters."
Below is a screenshot comparing the photo of the protester in the misleading posts (left) with the footage in the BBC's tweet (right):
AFP has previously debunked other posts related to the September 30, 2022, attack on the Kabul educational centre that claimed to show a survivor from the attack. Those posts incorrectly used the photo of a survivor from a previous attack in Kabul.
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