Claims: A viral social media post claims that a man killed and beheaded his daughter in Karachi.
Fact: The incident took place in Meerut, India not Pakistan. Further, images of a man and a young girl being shared with the claim are unrelated to this case.
On 26 August 2022, a Facebook post went viral claiming that a father killed and beheaded his daughter after she left home in Karachi. The claim is accompanied by images of a man and a girl wearing a pink scarf.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check conducted a reverse image search of the images. The search produced a news article in Hindi that claimed a girl named Sania was murdered by her father in Meerut, India, because he didn’t want her to wed the man of her choice.
However, the news article features two images of the alleged victim but both photos appear to show two different people.
To further investigate the authenticity of the news, Soch Fact Check conducted a keyword search on Google. The keyword result turned up an article by OpIndia published on 17 August 2022. The article mentioned that a headless body was found, and a man called Shahid Qureshi was arrested for murdering his daughter.
The Times of India also reported on the incident on 19 August. The article features a video and image of the man saying that he has no remorse for his actions. The same video went viral in Pakistan.
Jyoti Dwivedi a fact checker working for IFCN verified India Today, also confirmed that the incident happened in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh. She also verified that the girl in the pink scarf in the viral image is not the girl who was killed. Meerut police also shared an image of the victim which shows a different girl. The image shared by the Meerut police officials can be seen below:
A comparison of victim images shared by police officials and social media posts
Hence, it is evident that the incident did not happen in Pakistan, and the image associated with the victim is also false and misleading.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 30-day period from 10 August to 9 September using the following search terms:
- “کراچی میں لڑکی گھر سے نکلی تو والد نے لڑکی کا گلا کاٹ کر اس کے جسم سے الگ کردیا”
The search results showed that the keyword receive 5,700 interactions across 27 posts on Facebook. The post with graphic/violent images are shared here, here, here, here, here and here.
Conclusion: A recent incident of a man killing and beheading his daughter took place in India, not Pakistan. Moreover, an image of an unrelated girl is being shared in association with this case.