AI image of alleged murderer with Australian PM stokes anti-Labor outrage
- Published on July 14, 2026 at 06:29
- 2 min read
- By Dene-Hern CHEN, AFP Australia
After Australian national Simon Peter Carman was charged with the murder of a 17-year-old girl in Thailand, an altered image was shared in posts falsely claiming it showed him posing with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The image, which also shows Carman decked out in a Labor Party polo shirt and hat, appears to have been doctored from a photo taken on the day of his arrest.
"Child murderer Simon Peter Carman was a leftist and a staunch labor member. It seems he was even friends with Anthony Albanese," reads a post shared on July 1, 2026, on a conservative Facebook group called "Anti-Feminism Australia".
Attached to the post is a news still of Carman at a Thai police station, and another image appearing to show him posing next to the Australian prime minister.
Text above the images describes Carman as a "staunch" member of Albanese's ruling Labor Party.
The image surfaced after authorities arrested Carman, an Australian man living in Thailand, on June 26 and charged him with the premeditated murder of a 17-year-old girl whose body was found in a suitcase (archived link).
Police said CCTV footage showed Carman entering a condominium in the Thai beach town of Pattaya with the girl the day before, and then leaving later that evening carrying a large black suitcase. They said he loaded the suitcase onto a motorcycle and rode to a grassy area near a railway line in the city.
Police found the suitcase early on June 27 near a railway track, discovering inside the victim's body which bore signs of violence.
The image purportedly showing Carman standing with a smiling Albanese was also shared in similar TikTok, Instagram and X posts, as well as in conservative Australian Facebook groups.
"Birds of a feather flock together," read a comment on one of the conservative pages, while another quipped, "of course a Labor supporter".
The image, however, is fabricated.
A combination of keyword and reverse image searches on Google led to a photo of Carman published in a local media report on June 27 (archived link).
The photo shows Carman after his arrest, but his facial expression appears identical to that in the image of him and Albanese.
Analyses of the image using InVID WeVerify, which was co-developed by AFP, and the Hive Moderation tool both detected with over 90 percent confidence that it was AI-generated (archived here and here).
AFP has reached out to both the Prime Minister's Office and the Labor Party for comment.
Albanese and his Labor ministers are frequent targets of AI-generated falsehoods, which AFP has debunked in the past.
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