Claim: A picture of a minor girl is shared with a caption that implies she is an affectee of the recent devastating floods in Pakistan.
Fact: The child is a Rohingya refugee, who was photographed by Paula Bronstein on 29 October 2017.
On 25 August 2022, Pakistani actress and model Neelam Muneer Khan posted on her verified Instagram account a picture of a minor girl with tears streaming down her face, carrying something heavy over her head.
Muneer, who has more than six million followers and over 1,000 posts on Instagram, captioned the photograph as follows:
“Floods in Pakistan have created havoc. Homeless, displaced, devastated People of Pakistan are in horror & loss but our leaders are fighting with each other for power. How will they justify themselves in front of Allah Almighty?”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reverse-searched the image and found links to two articles — one by The Times, published on 26 November 2017 and another by The Intercept, published on 29 October 2017. Both carry the photo in question.
The Intercept’s article — “The Unwanted: A Haunting Look at the Rohingya Who Escaped Ethnic Cleansing” — is a photo essay with images taken by photographer Paula Bronstein. The second paragraph mentions, “You can see the nighttime devastation of families gathering their dead, washing their bodies, wrapping them in shrouds for burial, here in Paula Bronstein’s photographs.”
We tallied this using Google Lens, which immediately identified the person behind the camera as Bronstein.
We then checked Bronstein’s website, which was hyperlinked in The Intercept’s article and found the same photograph. The Times’ article for the image is:
“A Rohingya girl crosses a stream near Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh after being expelled from Burma. More than 600,000 Rohingya — more than half of them children — are in refugee camps. Our appeal with Save the Children aims to assist them. Picture: Paula Bronstein.”
The image is also available on Getty Images, where, too, it is credited to Bronstein.
Virality
The Instagram post by Neelam Muneer Khan was liked by more than 42,000 accounts.
Soch Fact Check found two viral tweets on Twitter, one by Amna Awan PTI (@_Aw225) and another by Saif Ullah (@SaifUll09191584), which received 155 likes and 62 likes, respectively, as well as 32 retweets and 23 retweets, respectively.
We also found the image shared here on Facebook.
Conclusion: The picture, which actually shows a Rohingya child, was taken by Paula Bronstein on 29 October 2017.