Doctored image shows man protesting US airport security in 2012

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 20, 2021 at 12:01
2 min read
By AFP India

Facebook posts shared hundreds of times purport to show a photo of Pakistani politician Shehryar Afridi strip-searched at a US airport in 2021. The claim is false; the image has been doctored from a photo of a man who stripped at an airport in 2012 to protest security procedures.

"At the airport, the US police stopped him and removed his clothes while checking him. After a plea from the Pakistani ambassador, he was allowed to go," reads a Pashto-language Facebook post published on September 18.

The post shows a photo of Shehryar Afridi, chairman of Pakistan's Parliamentary Committee on Kashmir, alongside a photo of a naked man.

Pashto text overlaid on the collage reads, "Clothes were taken off from a Pakistani minister at US airport".

Screenshot of the false claim shared on Facebook, taken on October 20, 2021

The post circulated following reports that Afridi was subjected to additional screening at New York's JFK airport in September.

The photos were shared in similar Facebook posts here and here.

However, the claim is false.

While the photo of the man on the left genuinely shows Afridi, the photo on the right has been doctored to insert his face.

The original photo was published by AP news agency in 2012.

According to AP's photo caption, the photo was taken on April 17, 2012 at Portland International Airport and shows a man named John E. Brennan "standing naked after he stripped down while going through a security screening area, as a protrest against airport security procedures".

Below is a screenshot comparison between the doctored image (left) and the original photo, which shows nudity (right).

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Screenshot of the doctored image (left) and original photo (right)

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News reports about Afridi's additional screening at JFK airport in September did not say that he was strip-searched, for example here and here.

Afridi criticised "fake news" about his arrival in New York in a tweet on September 19.

"I arrived in New York to fight the Kashmir case, the genocide of Kashmiris by the illegally occupying Indian army, to expose the war crimes to the world, but I was saddened that the pro-India lobby in my homeland is busy spreading fake news against me," he wrote in Urdu.

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