Image of ex-South Korean footballer's home altered to add North Korean icons
- Published on February 6, 2024 at 05:53
- 4 min read
- By SHIM Kyu-Seok, AFP South Korea
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
The doctored photo appears to show Cha Bum-kun, a former football player and ex-coach for South Korea's national team, posing for a group photo with various South Korean media personalities, including some left-leaning political commentators (archived link).
A North Korean flag and a portrait of the country's founder Kim Il Sung appears on the wall behind them.
"Cha Bum-kun, go to North Korea then," reads a Facebook post written in Korean that shared the manipulated picture on February 3, 2024.
Cha and his son Cha Du-ri are highlighted in red in the image. On a table in front of them, a copy of Time Magazine is seen featuring former South Korean president Moon Jae-in, who is accused by critics of having secret ties to North Korea (archived link).
Text superimposed at the bottom of the picture says in Korean: "The reception room at Cha Bum-kun's home. Wow, look at the wall."
Another picture in the top-right corner shows Cha meeting Moon in June 2018, while a third image in the bottom-right corner shows his son Cha Du-ri, a prominent football player in his own right who also played for South Korea's national team (archived links here and here).
The doctored image spread widely on Facebook, including here, here, here and here.
The posts circulated in Facebook groups critical of Moon after Cha submitted a petition in January asking for leniency towards Moon's former justice minister Cho Kuk, who is facing trial on charges of falsifying academic records for his two children (archived link).
The case was the biggest political scandal of Moon's presidency and effectively propelled his successor Yoon Suk Yeol to power after he directed an investigation into the Cho family as prosecutor general (archived link).
Some Facebook users appeared to believe the picture was a genuine photo of North Korean icons in Cha's home.
"I had suspicions he was a spy of some kind," one comment read.
"He worships Kim Il Sung too? Undoubtedly a Commie," another said.
While Cha genuinely travelled to North Korea in September 2018 along with Moon as part of an inter-Korean summit and also visited Korean schools in Japan aligned with Pyongyang in 2019 (archived link here and here), the image in the posts has been doctored.
Blank wall
A reverse image search on Google showed the same picture but without the North Korean flag or portrait of Kim Il Sung on the wall.
The original photo was published widely in recent reports about Cha's petition in the Cho Kuk trial, including here, here and here (archived links here, here and here).
South Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper said the original photo was first shared on the social media account belonging to Bae Sung-jae, a former sportscaster seen in the group photo (archived link).
A keyword search on Instagram found that while Bae's original account had been taken down, his post had been re-posted by another account on October 25, 2017 (archived link).
That post says: "[Bae] is showing off his [Moon Jae-in] watch again," alongside text from Bae's original post which says: "Barbeque party hosted by Coach Cha."
The original photo does not include a North Korean flag or a portrait of Kim Il Sung on the wall.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the doctored image (left) and the original image shared on Instagram in October 2017 (right):
The portrait of Kim Il Sung seen in the altered image is a common piece of North Korean iconography, seen featured in the same circular format on various websites -- including here and here -- or as badges seen in this South Korean report (archived links here, here and here).
AFP previously debunked multiple false claims linking Moon to North Korea, including here and here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
