Claim: A photograph shows Maulana Muhammad Amin, a relative of Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist Maulana Masood Azhar, who was shot by unknown gunmen in the Barkambakhel area of Bara, Pakistan. He was one of the key recruiters and leaders of the Pakistani terrorist organization Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Fact: The photograph shows a religious scholar, Maulana Muhammad Amin, who was critically injured in a firing raid carried out by unidentified assailants in the Barkambakhel area of Bara in the Khyber district of KPK. He has been shifted to a hospital.
On 27 December 2023, an Indian X account tweeted a photograph, claiming that it shows Maulana Muhammad Amin, a relative of terrorist Maulana Masood Azhar, who is also a recruiter and leader of the Pakistani terrorist organisation, Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Fact or Fiction?
Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) is a Sunni militant group based in Pakistan that seeks to annex Indian-Administered Kashmir (IAK) to Pakistan and govern Pakistan according to an extreme interpretation of the Shariah law. Radical Islamist scholar Masood Azhar, the man shown on the right in the image in the claim, founded the group in 1994.
The Khorasan Diary is a non-partisan, journalists-run platform which works on sharing real-time information from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Waziristan areas to counter the racial profiling of Pakhtuns as terrorists and to analyse developing security situations in Pakistan.
They published the image (archive) around 30 minutes before the claim, falsely linking Maulana Muhammad Amin to Jaish-e-Mohammed, surfaced. This image was just the monochrome image of Amin lying in a hospital bed, published with the following caption:
“ALERT:
A religious scholar, Maulana Muhammad Amin was critically injured in a firing raid carried out by unknown assailants in Barkambakhel area, Bara, Khyber tribal district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
“He has been shifted to hospital,” Police.”
Additionally, Soch Fact Check extensively reviewed recent coverage of such an issue on mainstream news websites in Pakistan and India but did not find any reliable accounts reporting that Amin was a recruiter and leader of JeM.
We also searched for names of the JeM leadership in the Mapping Militants database maintained by the Freeman Spogli Institute for Stanford and did not find Maulana Muhammad Amin mentioned as a leader or recruiter of the JeM.
This blog, published by the London School of Economics, covers the recent re-emergence of JeM activities and does not highlight anyone named Maulana Mohammed Amin as a leader or recruiter.
Virality
On X, the claim received more than 25,000 views and was reshared by another Indian account here, receiving more than 29,000 views.
On Facebook, the claim was shared here.
Conclusion: Maulana Muhammad Amin was not a Jaish-e-Mohammed leader and recruiter.
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Background image in cover photo: Hindustan Times
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