The photos are unrelated to the alleged attack and have been circulating online since 2010
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on February 26, 2020 at 18:00
- 4 min read
- By AFP Nigeria
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One of the misleading images appears in this article, which was first published on the Believers Portal website in July 2017 and has now resurfaced in Nigeria.
The story alleges that Muslim extremists had attacked missionaries from an organisation called Bibles For Mideast in the Middle East, without specifying a location.
Headlined “Muslims beat three Christians with iron pipes for sharing bibles”, the article features an image of three shackled men huddled on the ground with their faces covered.
The story has been shared more than 35,000 times on Facebook since it was first published three years ago, according to CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring tool.
Most shares have been happening since December 2019 when the Believers Portal republished its 2017 story on its Facebook page.
The picture accompanying this post, shared for example here and here, shows three men on the ground being violently beaten by a stick-wielding crowd.
Old pictures
Neither image is related to the claims made in the story.
Reverse image searches on Google and Yandex for the picture in the Facebook post led to this 2010 picture gallery on the Chinese news website ifeng.com.
The caption reads: “On March 26, 2010, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, angry villagers beat three captured robbers with sticks and stones, two of whom were killed. On the 25th, three robbers were arrested while robbing two women on motorcycles in the outskirts of the capital Phnom Penh.”
The image and story were picked up by English news websites, including Metro which published them on March 26, 2010, with the headline “Frenzied Cambodian mob kills motorcycle thieves with bamboo sticks”.
A reverse image search for the photo of the three shackled men led to this Reuters image taken on April 27, 2010, by Tomas Bravo.
The caption says the picture shows kidnapped victims at a ranch used by drug hitmen near the municipality of Sabinas Hidalgo in Mexico.
Origin of the claim
On June 13, 2016, a website claiming to represent evangelists secretly promoting Christianity in the Middle East posted a statement saying three of its missionaries had been attacked by Muslim extremists, without specifying a location.
Within days, the statement, published without an image, was picked up by several religious websites including here, here and here.
These stories, published in June 2016, are very similar in content and feature quotes attributed to the alleged director for Bibles for Mideast, named as pastor Paul Ciniraj.
However, they don’t feature the two misleading pictures. We’ve traced their first appearance to the Believers Portal website.
‘Implausible’ lion attack story
AFP has so far been unable to independently verify whether the attack described in the story really took place. It has contacted Bibles For Mideast via a form on its website but is yet to hear back.
A Google search for Ciniraj, the alleged head of Bibles for Mideast, revealed that his name appeared in a separate debunk by the Snopes website posted on April 26, 2017.
He was cited as claiming in a post that he and other Christians were rescued from the clutches of death by a group of three lions.
Snopes concluded the allegation was “extremely implausible based on the few details supplied”.
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