No, these photos do not show a recent farm attack in South Africa
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on February 7, 2019 at 17:36
- 3 min read
- By Tendai DUBE
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The graphic images posted on January 31, 2019 have garnered 2,647 shares, 599 reactions and 247 comments.
The misleading post regurgitates details of a robbery report originally posted by an armed response team in the area but leads with additional phrases such as “plaasaanval” which means farm attack in Afrikaans.
Comments on the post showed that some believed the images were fake, while others were further enraged by the post.
Drift Reaction, the armed response team called to the scene, told AFP that the images were not from the scene.
“It’s not even the same tiles in the house,” said Terry-Ann Terblanche, liaison officer for Drift Reaction.
The drift team went through all photos from the evening and confirm that no other pictures were released from that night except for the bloody shoe-print photograph they posted on their Facebook page.
“The other pics in my possession are gruesome but I will never release them,” she added.
“I am livid, this is such a serious incident. However, people and organisations must stick to facts”, said Terblanche.
The level of violence against farmers and farm workers is a hotly contested topic in South Africa that often makes international headlines -- see AFP’s report here about the backlash after US President Donald Trump’s tweet on land ‘seizures’.
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
A reverse image search of the photos confirmed that they were old photographs, that can be found posted as on an artistic blog Photos from where I’ve been by Rick Powell from 2011.
The second image in the post is from as early as 2014 according to the TinEye reverse image search under a gallery of images called Gruesome Crime Scene Photos.
Several pages and accounts on social media are either claiming to expose the “white genocide” in South Africa or on the opposite side exposing that it is a myth.
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