Photo from 2013 Karachi protest falsely linked to Peshawar suicide bombing
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on February 10, 2023 at 10:26
- 3 min read
- By Wasi MIRZA, AFP Pakistan
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The image was published here on Facebook on February 1, 2023 and shared more than 2,500 times.
It appears to show a burqa-clad woman giving bangles to a soldier, an insulting gesture that denotes calling someone a coward.
"After the Peshawar blast a woman is giving her bangles to a soldier to wear. Sad to see our demise. But happy to see our awareness," reads the Urdu-language caption.
The image was shared following a suicide bombing at a mosque inside Pakistan police headquarters in the northwestern city of Peshawar on January 30, 2023 that killed 84 people.
Similar posts were shared hundreds of times on Facebook here, here and here, and on Twitter here, here and here.
Comments by Facebook users indicated they believed the image was related to the recent attack.
"All these soldiers are patriots, but their superiors are not good," wrote one Facebook user.
"Salute to the brave lady," wrote another Facebook user.
But the image predates the blast by nearly a decade.
2013 protest
A reverse image and keyword search on Google found the photo published here on May 13, 2013 by Pakistan online media outlet Hamari Web.
The photo is captioned: "Women gave Bangles to Rangers in Karachi."
Karachi is a city in southern Pakistan.
Below is a screenshots comparison of the photo in the misleading posts (left) and the photo on Hamari Web (right):
Following the 2013 general elections in Pakistan -- won by Nawaz Sharif -- supporters of opposition parties including Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and the Islamist Jammat-e-Islami party had staged protests in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi against alleged vote rigging, reported by AFP here and local newspaper the Express Tribune here.
Further keyword searches found a one-minute, 13-second video with similar scenes to the photo published on the video-sharing site DailyMotion on May 14, 2013.
It is titled: "Women gives bangles to coward Pakistan police and Pakistan rangers during election day (2013)."
The caption states the video shows a protest in Karachi against the alleged vote rigging in May 2013.
The same woman and bearded soldier seen in the photo appear at the video's 14-second mark.
Below is a screenshot of the video showing the woman trying to hand bangles to the soldier:
The same photo was shared in 2019 alongside false claims debunked by AFP here.
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