This photo shows female police officers in Dubai, not Sri Lanka
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on September 18, 2019 at 11:00
- 2 min read
- By AFP Sri Lanka
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The photo was published in this Facebook post on September 4, 2019.
It has been shared more than 1,100 times.
The photo shows two female police officers wearing headscarves standing in front of a police car.
Below is the screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:
The Sinhala language text superimposed on the image translates to English as:
“"Did you think it’s an Arab country as soon as you saw it..?
“No. You thought wrong. This is part of this country that is going to be an Arabic country. It’s Bambalapitiya".
Bambalapitiya is in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo.
The misleading post was published days after tens of thousands of Bohra Muslims arriving in Colombo for the annual Bohra conference. The event was held between September 1st and 10th, according to this AFP report.
Comments by some social media users on the misleading post suggest they believed the claim. Below is a screenshot of one of the comments:
The Sinhala language comment translates to English as: “We can only watch and wait. Our country is destroyed. If not Buddhists have to step out to the streets as one”.
The same image was shared on Facebook here, here and here with a similar claim.
The claim is false; the photo shows two police officers in Dubai in 2016.
A reverse image search on Google found this photo published by photo agency Shutterstock.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the image on Shutterstock (L) and the image in the misleading posts (R):
The photo’s caption states: “Dubai. Summer 2016. Dubai women police at the luxurious Ferrari near Dubai Mall smile. Arab woman in the modern world. Welcome Dubai.”
The same image was published in this article by Jordanian news site Al Bawaba about deploying all-women patrolling units in Dubai in August 2019.
The logo on the car in Shutterstock photo (L) is identical to the Dubai Police logo (R) as seen in the comparison below:
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