Claim: A picture shows the alleged Belgian woman who was sexually assaulted in Islamabad, Pakistan
Fact: The picture is not of the alleged victim but shows Czech Republic model Tereza Hluskova in court after she was sentenced to eight years in prison for smuggling drugs in 2019.
On 19 August 2024, a Threads account News Daily posted an image with the caption, “Pakistan: Belgian woman found on streets after allegedly raped for 5 days”. The post shows an image of a female foreigner crying.
The picture was shared after a woman was found bound and gagged on a roadside in Islamabad by the police on 14 August. According to Dawn, the woman introduced herself as a Belgian citizen. She told the police she had arrived in Islamabad six months ago, alleging that she was repeatedly subjected to sexual assault by a man she had been living with, the report added. Later, on 16 August, the Islamabad police told the media that the woman was not a foreigner but a resident of Rawalpindi, the twin city of Islamabad. The case is still under investigation at the time of publishing.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse-image search on the picture and the results on Google Lens led to a news article published by The Daily Mail on 20 March 2019 which included the image from the Threads post in question.
The article, headlined “Model breaks down in tears as she is sentenced to eight years in prison in Pakistan for trying to smuggle £1million of heroin into Ireland”, reported that Czech model Tereza Hluskova was arrested at Lahore airport in January 2018. The model was found trying to smuggle 19 lbs (8.5kg) of heroin to Ireland via Dubai, after which was sentenced to eight years in prison on 20 March 2019. The picture from the viral post, originally credited to AFP/Getty Images, shows the model breaking down on the day of her sentencing.
We found that the same image was posted on the stock photos’ website Getty Images in 2019, and its caption confirms that it showed a Czech model after she was sentenced to eight years in prison in a smuggling case.
An article on Tereza Hluskova, published in November 2023, by The Mirror featured the same image of her. According to the caption in this article, the image is from when “Terza wept when she was sentenced to eight years in jail”. Hluskova was released from prison in 2022 and now lives in her hometown, the article added.
Furthermore, Soch Fact Check observed that the female police officer in the picture, behind the woman, is wearing a Punjab Police uniform. It is different from the uniform of the Islamabad Police which is handling the case of a Belgian woman’s alleged sexual assault.
Therefore, Soch Fact Check confirms that the picture of the woman in the viral Threads post is not of the Belgian woman from Islamabad who was allegedly assaulted recently.
Notably, this fact check does not aim to verify whether the incident of sexual assault took place or whether the victim is a Belgian citizen or not. It only debunks that the picture in the claim is not related to the case. In fact, it shows a former Czech model who was sentenced to eight years in prison in 2019.
Virality
On X, one post (archive) received 1.6 million views, 23,000 likes and 8,700 reposts. It was mostly shared by Indian users on X here, here and here.
It was also posted here, here and here on Facebook, here and here on Threads.
Conclusion: A picture that shows a woman crying as she is escorted by the police is not related to the recent case of a Belgian woman’s assault in Islamabad. The picture is from 2019 and shows Czech model Tereza Hluskova breaking down after she was sentenced to eight years in prison, on charges of drug trafficking by a court in Lahore.
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Background image in cover photo: Shutterstock
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