Old picture of Imran Khan wrongly used in Nov 2022 attack reports

Claim: A picture shows Pakistan’s former prime minister and chief of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Imran Khan, lying on a stretcher after being wounded in a shooting incident during a rally he was leading towards Islamabad, Punjab, on 3 October 2022.

Fact: The picture is not recent but, in fact, from 2014 when Khan was staging a sit-in against the then-government. He had tweeted it himself.

On 3 October 2022, the Twitter account @JameWiliams posted a picture of Imran Khan wearing a black shalwar kameez and lying down with his hands raised as if in prayer. The image was accompanied by the caption, “Praying for your speedy recovery. God bless you #ImranKhan.”

@JameWiliams describes himself as “the royal correspondent of the Daily Express in London”. His post comes shortly after Imran Khan was wounded in the leg in what his party officials have claimed was an assassination attempt.

Fact or Fiction?

Soch Fact Check used TinEye Reverse Image Search to ascertain the image’s origin and found that it was Khan himself who tweeted it more than eight years ago.

Night at the dharna. pic.twitter.com/5ppIGJAs1S

— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) August 17, 2014

On 17 August 2014, the former prime minister — whose party, the PTI, had organised a sit-in against the then-government — captioned the photo as, “Night at the dharna.”

Virality

Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 12-hour period up to 8 pm on 3 October 2022 using the following search terms:

• “Imran Khan”
• “عمران خان”

The first search term turned up more than 2.59 million interactions across 7,438 posts on Facebook and over 1.23 million interactions across 983 posts on Instagram. The second search term turned up 26,791 Facebook posts with upwards of 4.99 million interactions and 666 Instagram posts with almost 0.54 million interactions. While neither search term exclusively yielded the image in question, a substantial number of posts did.

Soch Fact Check found that the image was shared here, here, and here on Twitter.

On Facebook, the picture was shared here and here, while on Instagram, it was shared here, here, here, and here.

Conclusion: The picture is not recent but, in fact, from 2014 when Imran Khan was staging a sit-in against the then-government. He had tweeted it himself.