Bust of 'St. Kian Delos Santos' at drug war victims exhibition is AI creation
- Published on February 5, 2026 at 09:10
- Updated on February 5, 2026 at 09:11
- 2 min read
- By Ara Eugenio, AFP Philippines
Victims of extrajudicial killings under former president Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs were honoured at a new exhibition in the Philippine Senate, but an image circulating online that supposedly depicts a bust of 17-year-old victim Kian delos Santos enclosed in a glass case was altered with the assistance of AI. Photos of the exhibit show the glass case in fact contained the shirt of a three-year-old victim.
"Saint Kian Delos Santos 'the runner' in (sic) museum. Have mercy on us sinners," reads the caption of a Facebook image shared on January 29, 2026.
The image, which has more than 460 shares, appears to show Philippine Senator Risa Hontiveros and Catholic priest Flaviano Villanueva looking at the bust of a young man. The bust, enclosed in a glass case, bears the name "St. Kian Delos Santos".
Delos Santos was a 17-year-old teenager murdered by police officers in a dank Manila alley in 2017, with the force initially claiming he was a drug courier who fired at them while resisting arrest (archived link).
CCTV footage, however, showed the unarmed boy being dragged away while pleading for his life moments before he was killed.
Three policemen were sentenced to decades for the murder, marking the first convictions linked to former president Rodrigo Duterte's flagship war on drugs campaign that rights groups say left thousands dead. Duterte is awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague over alleged crimes against humanity linked to the campaign (archived link).
The same image was shared in similar Facebook posts after the launch of an exhibition dedicated to victims of extrajudicial killings under Duterte's war on drugs (archived link).
But the circulating image has been manipulated.
Dther Gutierrez, communications and media officer of the AJ Kalinga Foundation, which runs the mobile museum documenting the killings, told AFP: "The display that is in that case is a shirt of Myca, a three-year-old who was shot and killed during the war on drugs.
Gutierrez said the photograph of Villanueva and Hontiveros was taken within the halls of the Philippine Senate on January 26, during the launch of the exhibition.
"Currently the mobile museum doesn’t have any artefact that belongs to Kian Delos Santos," he said on February 4.
AI alteration
A reverse image search on Google led to a similar photo from the exhibition's launch that was uploaded to Facebook on the same day by Philippine news outlet Inquirer.net (archived link).
Instead of a bust depicting Delos Santos, a child's blue shirt can be seen enclosed in the glass case. The boy in the school uniform is also not present in the photo.
A closer look at the image also shows signs that it had been manipulated using AI, such as the distorted facial features of Hontiveros and the boy beside her, and a reflection of the blue shirt still visible on the glass even though it has been replaced by the bust.
An analysis of the image by the DeepFake-o-meter tool developed by the University at Buffalo gave it an AI-generated likelihood of 94.2 percent (archived link).
AFP has previously debunked other false claims related to Duterte's war on drugs.
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