Student killed by teacher at Mansehra public school?

Claim: Images show a child was tortured to death by a teacher at a public school in Mansehra, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Fact:  While the photo of the boy in a school uniform is most likely from Mansehra, the collage of images in the claim showing his lacerated body, is unrelated to the incident. The images in the collage are actually from Yemen.

On 4 January 2025, a post on Facebook shared two photos claiming that they showed a child from a public school in Mansehra who was tortured to death by his teacher. The caption claimed that the child was a student at the English-medium Tameer-i-Watan school in Mansehra, and he was the only brother of five sisters. According to the post, the child’s father worked abroad.

This article does not aim to fact-check the details of the incident but only if the images are related. 

Two images were shared in the post. One showed a picture of the boy lying on his back in his school uniform:

Source: Facebook

The other image is a collage of photos showing bodily scars on, allegedly, the child’s body. A collage of three such photos was shared in the claim:

Source: Facebook

Fact or Fiction?

Image of the boy in uniform

Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search of the first photo, showing the body of the boy in his school uniform. This provided a large number of results, most of which were from January 2025, that had the same caption as the post in the claim. However, a post on Instagram showed an alternate photo of the child that was shot from a horizontal angle. We then ran a reverse image search of this photo, which resulted in a number of posts from April 2024.

The captions of these posts contained additional information about the boy and the circumstances of his death. Apart from mentioning that he was from Tameer-i-Watan public school in Mansehra, was the only brother of five sisters, and that his father worked abroad, the posts also stated that the child was thirteen-years-old and enrolled in the seventh grade. 

They mentioned that according to the medical report of the incident, he suffered a heavy blow to the head. As the injury was deep, the child passed away. Lastly, the captions of these posts also questioned why the school administration simply left him in the hospital, and appealed for an inquiry to be made into the case.

Soch Fact Check also came across a video on X from 4 April 2024 that showed the boy in uniform. The caption of the post stated that the child was allegedly tortured to death in Tameer-i-Watan school in Mansehra.

Searching for “Mansehra boy death” on Google led us to three news articles from April 2024 in which a 13 year-old boy from the school of Tameer-i-Watan in Mansehra passed away under mysterious circumstances. None of the articles included the first image in the claim, allegedly of the dead body of the boy. 

All three articles explained how the school stated that the student died of natural causes, but the student’s family disputed this and lodged an FIR, suspecting the school’s administration of being involved in the boy’s death. However, the family did not clarify how they believed the school to be involved. None of the articles reported any evidence of the student being tortured by school officials. As of now, Soch Fact Check cannot independently verify the circumstances of his death, and neither is there any conclusive information as to what led to the student’s death. 

Hence, Soch Fact Check cannot confirm if the picture of the boy in a uniform, shared in the claim, is of the same student of Tameer-i-Watan who passed away under mysterious circumstances. However, seeing that the image was previously also linked to the same claim in the past, it is likely that the first image actually shows the body of the same student.

Images of bodily lacerations

Conducting a reverse-image search for the images of bodily scars, Soch Fact Check found that the images were in fact from Yemen. 

We first came across this news article by Moroccan news website SNRT News that claimed these photos originated in Yemen in 2020. This was then corroborated via a fact-check carried out by Fact Crescendo, an IFCN-certified digital journalism platform based in India. According to the fact-check, the images were initially being passed off as showing a boy beaten by the Taliban. However, several news websites pointed to the event having occurred in Yemen, where a father severely beat his child, resulting in lacerations across the child’s body.

Fact Crescendo previously fact-checked these photos in March 2021 as well. Hence, the photos in the claim showing lacerations on a child’s body are unrelated to the event of a child passing away in Mansehra.

Virality

On Facebook, the claim was shared here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

On Instagram, the claim was shared here and here.

Conclusion: The photo of the boy in a school uniform is likely of the same student from the Tameer-i-Watan school in Mansehra who died under mysterious circumstances in April 2024. Soch Fact Check could not independently verify the circumstances of his death, but we can confirm that the photos of bodily lacerations are from Yemen and unrelated to the boy.

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Background image in cover photo: Tameer-i-Wattan Public Schools and Colleges

To appeal against our fact-check, please send an email to appeals@sochfactcheck.com