No, this video does not show Pakistani Christian woman Asia Bibi meeting Pope Francis

This article is more than one year old.
Published on November 19, 2018 at 17:00
2 min read
By AFP Pakistan

A video posted on Facebook claims to show Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman whose death sentence for blasphemy was overturned last month, meeting Pope Francis after she was allowed to leave Pakistan by Prime Minister Imran Khan. The video is from 2015 and the woman shown shaking hands with the Pope is not Bibi but her teenage daughter.

This video, which was posted to Facebook on on November 13, 2018, has a caption saying: “Asia Bibi meet with pope. final Imran Khan release her & she escape from Pakistan.”

The video has a watermark from Rome Reports, a TV news agency based in Rome which covers the Vatican.

Rome Reports originally published the video on their official YouTube account on April 16, 2015 with a caption saying: Pope Francis meets the husband of Asia Bibi, a Christian sentenced to death in Pakistan.

Bibi was on death row in Pakistan awaiting a Supreme Court appeal in 2015. Her daughter and husband travelled to the Vatican that year.

The woman shaking hands with the Pope in the video is not Bibi, but her daughter.

Her daughter is seen in multiple news reports, for example here and here, at the Vatican in 2015, and is wearing the same clothes in exactly the same setting as the women in the misleading video.

“He gave me blessings and I can't remember more," the daughter, Esham, told AFP in an interview in 2016, describing her meeting with the Pope the previous year.

Footage from that trip has been widely shared in misleading contexts in recent days, for example here alongside a claim Bibi is in France.

Bibi was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to death in 2010 after a local imam claimed she had insulted the Prophet Mohammed. She denied the charges.

Pakistan's Supreme Court on October 31 overturned Bibi's conviction, igniting protests by hardline Islamists who called for her execution and said she should not be allowed to leave Pakistan.

She was released from prison one week later, but her location is unknown.

Rumours about her leaving Pakistan have been widely shared on social media and messaging apps. Here is a screenshot of one such post shared in WhatsApp:

Snapshot of a Whatsapp group

The Pakistani government has repeatedly said that Bibi remains in the country at a safe, undisclosed location.

Here is an AFP story after she was freed.

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