Pakistani singer Rabi Pirzada shared a set of unrelated photos on Twitter showing scenes of animal sacrifice, militant attacks and riots. The caption shared with these photos falsely claim to show a recent genocide of Kashmiris by the Indian Army.
Trigger Warning: Certain Images In This Article Can Be Disturbing In Nature
#osint In The House
On August 31, 2019, Pakistani singer Rabi Pirzada shared a set of four photos, claiming to show of a recent genocide of Kashmiris.
The disturbing images portray scenes of slaughter, with streets full of blood.
Do these images really portray a recent genocide of the Kashmiris, as Pirzada claims?
#osint Epic Fail
On a closer look at the images, it became quite apparent that the images were unrelated to the recent situation in Kashmir, and in some cases quite old.
Photo 1 & 4:
The first and the fourth photos (both being identical) show small groups of people gathered in the streets with dead cattle, indicating a strong possibility of ritual slaughter.
Using a reverse image search, we traced the image back to a Facebook post shared on August 14, 2019 - just two days after Eid Qurban - when ritual slaughter of cattle becomes ubiquitous in Muslim households.
Photo 2
The "shutterstock" watermark in the second image made it very apparent that it was taken from Shutterstock - a distributor of stock photos.
A reverse image search revealed that the image was taken in 2007 by photographer Ashish Sharma for Shutterstock.
Photo 3
Performing a reverse image search on the third photo took us to a three-year old article by Patrika, carrying the exact same image.
According to the article, the incident portrayed a terrorist attack in Srinagar on May 23, 2016, which led to the death of 3 police officers.
There has been sporadic protests around Kashmir since the government's decision to abrogate Article 370 and dissolve the state into Union Territories while imposing a lock-down in the valley.
However, there has not been any reporting of genocide in the valley as of now. The images shared by Pirzada are thus unrelated to the recent events.