Posts share old photo of Egyptian protest victims as people 'killed in Islamic terrorist attack in France'
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on June 13, 2023 at 06:15
- 4 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
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"Bodies of victims killed by an Islamic terrorist group in France. If we allow a mosque to be built in Daegu, South Korea will become like this," reads the Korean-language caption to a photo shared on Facebook here on June 7, 2023.
The post is referring to the controversy surrounding the construction of a mosque for Muslims students studying at a university in South Korea's southeastern city of Daegu.
According to an Al Jazeera report, local residents have staged continuous protests since the plan was approved in 2020. The report says opponents to the plan have often resorted to Islamophobic behaviour such as calling the students "terrorists" and organising pork barbeques near the site (archived link).
Content warning
The same photo was shared alongside identical claims on popular South Korean forums Naver Band here and DC Inside here and here.
Comments on the posts suggest several users believed the image showed victims of an attack by an Islamic terrorist group.
"This is a religion that openly calls for killing, they should be kicked out," wrote one user.
Another wrote: "This is frightening. The mosque cannot be allowed to be built."
The photo, however, shows victims of a crackdown by Egypt's military government on civilian protesters in 2013.
Crackdown victims in Egypt
A reverse image search on Google led to a news report containing the same picture that was published by Morocco World News on August 15, 2013 (archived link).
The report, by AFP, is about police in Egypt entering a mosque containing the bodies of several dozen Islamist protesters, and is titled, "Egypt police takes over mosque with protester bodies: Islamists".
The picture, however, does not have a caption or a photo credit.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo shared in the false post (left) and the same photo published alongside the AFP report published by Morocco World News (right):
Content warning
The same photo was also published in an NPR report from the same day with a caption that credits the photo to AFP and photographer Khaled Desouki (archived link).
The caption says the photo was taken at the El-Iman mosque in Cairo, where more than 200 bodies were being prepared for burial.
According to the NPR report, they were supporters of Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who had been removed from power just a month earlier by the Egyptian military.
Hundreds of people were killed in August 2013 when security forces moved in on two huge camps where for more than a month thousands of Morsi supporters had been calling for his reinstatement.
The same picture can be seen on AFP's photo archive here (archived link).
Content warning
A search of AFP's photo archive showed Desouki also captured several other photos from inside the mosque, including here and here (archived links here and here).
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