Claim: KP Police carried out a raid at local restaurants that were found preparing meals with dog meat; accompanying pictures show various dishes, as well as carcasses, recovered during the operation.
Fact: The photos are old and unrelated. KP Police has not carried out any such raid.
On 15 September 2023, the Facebook page ‘Kabal News swat’ posted (archive) three pictures claiming to show the results of a raid on hotels in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province selling food prepared with dog meat.
The post is captioned as follows:
“خیبرپختونخوا پولیس کے متعدد ہوٹلوں پر چھاپے۔ مختلف قسم کے ذبح شدہ کتے اور پکی ہوئی کڑھایئاں ضبط کر لی گئی ھوٹل مالکان کے بدوران انٹاروکیشن کہنا ہے کہ شہریوں پر پانچ سالوں سے کتا کڑاہی اور کتا بریانی کھلا رہے تھے
[Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police raided several hotels. Different types of slaughtered dogs and cooked karhai [dishes] were seized. During interrogation, hotel owners said they were serving dog karhai and dog biryani to citizens for the past five years.]”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check first reached out to KP Police through their WhatsApp number; in response they first pointed out that the reports do not mention any district, so the claim in itself is vague.
Secondly, KP Police does not conduct such operations; rather, it is the concerned food bodies — namely Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Food Department and KP Food Safety & Halal Food Authority. Neither of the two have carried out such a raid or recovered dog meat as of 19 September 2023, according to their social media accounts here and here.
No such operation is mentioned on the KP Police’s Facebook page either.
Soch Fact Check also reverse-searched the images and found them to be not only unrelated but old as well.
One of three pictures that shows dog carcasses hanging was traced back to a 2012 Change.org petition related to dog slaughter in Vietnam. This image also made the rounds in India in 2018.
The other images — which showed a plate of rice and meat, a police officer pouring food from one wok to another, and two cops holding the carcass of a small animal — are also old. Two of them appeared in a 18 September 2018 post on the blockchain-based social media website Steemit.
The photo of a plate of rice and meat also appears in two April 2018 X posts, here and here, the former of which is attached to the claim that dog meat was found being used in Saudi Arabia.
Read more: Old video of slaughterhouse raid wrongly linked to inflation
A 2019 Facebook post carried the same claim but in a picture of a news clipping that includes a photo of a skinned dog. That image is also unrelated since it is from Iran’s Fars News Agency (archive).
Some posts also include a screenshot of an ARY News bulletin; however, Soch Fact Check was unable to verify if the media outlet did indeed run such a report.
Interestingly, when the pictures surfaced in 2018, Riaz Khan Mehsud — then the director-general of the KP Food Safety and Halal Food Authority — had refuted (archive) the claims.
“There is no truth to these reports that dogs are being butchered and cooked in restaurants in Kohat. Some elements trying to create doubts in [the] minds of the people had been sharing eight months old fake pictures of dogs which were never captured in any part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” Mehsud had said.
Lastly, concerning the recent claims, Zama Swat News said it spoke to the assistant commissioner of Mardan’s Babuzai union council, police sources, and a cook at a local restaurant, all of whom refuted the viral claim.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found that the claim appeared here, here, here, here, and here on Facebook, among others. It was also shared here on X.
In 2021, Daily Nai Baat and Neo News published reports carrying the same fake claim and, in 2018, the Pakistan Defence forum did the same.
Conclusion: The photos are old and unrelated. KP Police has not carried out any such raid.
Background image in cover photo: Raman
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[…] claim was also shared on the Pakistan Defence forum — which has spread false and misleading information in the past as well — here […]