Posts claiming to show S. Korea politician's 'wound after knife attack' share doctored picture
- Published on January 20, 2024 at 09:34
- 4 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
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The doctored picture was shared on Facebook on January 4, two days after Lee was stabbed in his neck during a trip to a construction site in the southern city of Busan.
"This is the wound for which he rode a helicopter twice and abandoned Busan," reads its Korean-language caption.
The picture shows what appears to be a tiny wound on the lower left side of Lee's face alongside text that reads: "Thankfully the wound is confirmed to be only around 1 cm, not that deep."
Lee suffered a wound to his jugular vein in the knife attack and was first taken to a hospital in Busan, then flown via helicopter to the capital Seoul where he underwent a nearly two-hour surgery.
Eight days after the incident, 60-year-old Lee was discharged from the Seoul National University Hospital.
The mention of the wound size in the false post refers to a statement from the country's National Counter Terrorism Center released immediately after the attack that Lee's wound was a "laceration of about one centimetre long" (archived link).
His party has since filed a police complaint against the anti-terrorism agency for allegedly understating his wound's size and characterising it as a laceration, as well as for calling the suspect's 12.5-centimetre blade a "fruit knife" (archived link).
The doctored picture has been shared in at least 50 other social media posts including here, here, here and here.
Comments left in the posts showed many users were misled to believe the image genuinely showed Lee's wound after the stabbing.
"It just looks like a scrape that children get when they're playing, talk about overreaction," one user wrote.
"This is a far cry from Seoul National University hospital's statement that the wound was serious. It doesn't look like it needed major surgery," another user said, adding: "This shows that [the attack] was all a show."
The original photo -- which shows no wound on Lee's neck -- shows him meeting supporters in July 2021.
Doctored image
A keyword search on the South Korean search engine Naver found a photo matching the doctored image published by the news organisation Newsis (archived link).
The article was published on July 31, 2021 and the picture shows Lee -- who was a presidential candidate at the time -- greeting supporters.
The original image clearly shows no wound or red mark on Lee's neck.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the doctored photo (left) and the original photo published by Newsis (right):
Lee's visit that day was also captured in other photos and footage published by local media, which also shows him without any clear wound on his face or neck (archived links here and here).
Different clothing
Footage and photos of the attack on Lee in January 2024 also show his clothing at the time of the stabbing was different from that seen in the false posts.
Footage of the attack published by local media here and here, as well as in a live stream captured by one of Lee's supporters at the scene, shows Lee without a mask and wearing a blue tie, a light blue dress shirt and a black coat at the time (archived links here, here and here).
Below is a comparison between Lee's appearance in footage captured by his supporter moments before the attack (left) and the original Newsis photo used to create the altered photo (right):
Meanwhile, in Lee's appearance in front of the press following his discharge from the hospital on January 10, he did not wear a tie and had a large bandage over his wound, as seen in reports here and here (archived links here and here).
AFP had previously debunked a false claim alleging Lee's attacker stabbed him with a chopstick instead of a knife.
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