No, this is not a photo of a Philippine fishing boat hit by a Chinese trawler in June 2019
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on June 20, 2019 at 11:15
- 3 min read
- By AFP Philippines
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Multiple Facebook posts, for example this one – published June 13, 2019, and shared more than 4,600 times since – contain the photo, which shows a sinking boat with people clinging on to plastic containers floating in the water around it.
When translated, the post’s caption, written in a mixture of Tagalog and English, says:
“THIS IS HOW SHAMELESS THE CHINESE ARE after their ship hit the small fishing vessel of the Filipinos they left them as if nothing happened. Thanks to our Vietnamese friends who helped the Filipino fishermen.
“UPDATE: The crew of the Filipino vessel that sank after being hit by a Chinese fishing vessel in Recto Bank were sleeping when the incident happened over the weekend, according to a relative of the Filipino boat's captain.”
Below is a screenshot of the post:
The caption is referring to to a collision that took place in the South China Sea on June 9, 2019, in which a Chinese trawler hit a Filipino fishing boat.
After the crash, the Chinese boat sailed away without rescuing the Filipino crew, who were eventually picked up by a Vietnamese boat. Here is an AFP report about the incident.
The same photo was also shared elsewhere on Facebook with a similar claim, for example here and here.
But the photo in the posts does not show the aftermath of the June 9, 2019 collision.
A reverse image search on Google traced the photo back to this August 2018 report on local news site Sunstar.com, dated August 3, 2018.
Below is a screenshot of the photo as it appears in the report:
The report is about the Philippine Navy’s rescue of 37 Filipino fishermen from a sinking boat found in the waters off the island of Palawan.
It does not mention China and includes this paragraph about the cause of the incident:
“According to the rescued fishermen, they departed Occidental Mindoro on July 31 but their boat was battered by strong winds and big waves in the early morning of August 2, resulting in the mishap.”
The photo in the report is credited to the Philippine Navy. A search of one of the navy’s Facebook pages found this post about the rescue that contains the same image.
The Navy Facebook post, dated August 3, 2018, is embedded below:
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the misleading post (L) and the photo from the Philippine Navy’s Facebook account (R):
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