Fact Check: Unrelated photos go viral linking them to recent school blast in Peshawar
Distressing images of a wounded child and pencils in a pool of blood have gone viral with the claim that they are from the recent school blast in Peshawar.
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India Today Fact Check
None of the pictures are from the Peshawar blast. While one picture is available on the Internet since 2018, the other is from Syria.
Disturbing images of a wounded child and a pen and pencil lying in a pool of blood are circulating on social media with the claim that these were what a recent blast at a religious school in Pakistan’s Peshawar had caused. The bomb attack on October 27 had killed seven studentsand wounded many.
Messages circulating on Facebook have linked the images to the blast, with the hashtag #PeshawarAttack.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that none of the pictures are related to the Peshawar blast. While one picture is available on the Internet since 2018, the other is from Syria.
The archived versions of the posts can be seen here and here. Using reverse image search, we found the truth behind both the pictures.
The bloodied floor
This image is available on Internet since 2018 and has been used by various websites on several occasions as a stock shot. We also found that some websites from Bangladesh had carried this picture while reporting on a road accident in 2018 that killed a school student in Dhaka.
The injured kid
We found that this picture of the wounded child was uploaded by “Getty Images” on January 11 this year.
As per the image caption, the kid was injured in an airstrike by Syrian government forces on Idlib city as civil war rages on in the country. The pictured was originally clicked by an AFP photographer.
Therefore, we can say that since both the images were taken months before the bomb attack at the religious school in Peshawar, claims linking them to the incident are misleading.
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