Photoshopped Image Shared To Claim Hillary Clinton Met Osama bin Laden

An image making the rounds on Facebook claims to show former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shaking hands with late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. This is false: AFP Fact Check found that the image has been doctored to add bin Laden, who was killed by US forces in 2011. The original version shows Clinton with Indian musician Shubhashish Mukherjee at an event in 2004.

The image, shared hundreds of times and archived here, shows Clinton shaking hands with bin Laden. The picture is marked with the text: "Remember this picture when you go to vote". It was shared on September 29, 2020 -- roughly five weeks before the US presidential election, which will see Republican President Donald Trump face off against Democrat Joe Biden.

A screenshot of the false post, taken on October 20, 2020

This is a doctored image for a Photoshop contest

AFP Fact Check found that this image first made the rounds before the 2016 US presidential election when Clinton was running against Trump. A simple reverse image search led us to multiple fact checks done before the 2016 election, including this one by Snopes.

We traced the image to a January 2007 Photoshop contest by a news-oriented Photoshop contest website called Freaking News. The original image shows Indian musician Shubhashish Mukherjee with Clinton at a dinner held in May 2004 at the annual dinner of the Asia Society Washington Center. His head was replaced with bin Laden's in the Photoshopped version.

The original image before it was Photoshopped

When this picture was taken in 2004, Clinton was a member of the US senate.

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US special forces killed bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. At the time, Barack Obama was president and Clinton served as secretary of state.

The current US president recently retweeted a baseless conspiracy theory holding that Obama and Biden had staged bin Laden's killing and then killed the special forces involved in the operation to cover it up. Asked about this during a town hall meeting, Trump said, "That was a retweet, that was an opinion from somebody. I'll put it out there. People can decide."

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by BOOM staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)