Fake News Alert: No, This Orphan Child Is NOT A Police Officer In Tamil Nadu
What is the claim?
A photo is circulated on social media showing a poor child on the left and a police officer on the right. The photo is accompanied by a Bengali text that translates to "Strength and Honesty can lead you to success. An orphan Nevatha Pethuraj is a police officer in Tamil Nadu today."
What is the truth?
A fact check revealed that the photo is fake. The woman shown as a police officer is not the orphan child Nevatha Pethuraj. The woman is actually a Tamil actress and the girl shown in the image is a Pakistani child.
How did we find out that the image is fake?
We saw the Bengali text written on the image and we translated it to English. It says: "Strength and Honesty can lead you to success. An orphan Nevatha Pethuraj is a police officer in Tamil Nadu today."
We cropped the image of the police officer through Snipping tool and searched it on Google using reverse image search.
The girl featured as a police officer is Nivetha Pethuraj, a Tamil actress. The picture being used is from Nivedita’s film Thimiru Pudichavan.
Here are some still images from her movie:
We also cropped the image of the orphanage girl through Snipping tool and searched it on google images.
On performing the reverse image search we found a website claiming that the girl's name is Hira and she hails from Pakistan. We got this information on an NGO website of Pakistan where this photo was used.
The same photo was also used on the website of a UAE-based photographer Sohail Karmani who claimed that he clicked this photo in Sahiwal, Pakistan.
We also found this photo on Facebook by a page called Kolkata / Calcutta (City of Joy). We observed that the page has 786,431 followers till date. We analyzed the content of the page and found many posts that are misleading. We also checked the review section of the page, many people have lodged a complaint regarding the contents posted on this page.
What is our verdict: The photograph of a Tamil actress and a Pakistani girl have been used in a fraudulent way in the viral photo.
