Bleeding woman breastfeeding baby: Image not from Manipur, at least 2-year old

An image of an injured woman bleeding from her head and breastfeeding her child in that condition is being shared on social media with the claim that the visual is from the violence-stricken Manipur. Several users have shared the image mentioning that this has not happened in Syria, Sudan or Ukraine, but in Manipur where for the past two months innocent civilians are dying.

Sharing the above-mentioned image on Twitter, user @jadonjpr, a Twitter Blue subscriber, added a caption in Hindi that can be translated as: “Oh Mother, this pathetic picture of pain, fear, helplessness is not from Syria, Sudan, Ukraine but from Manipur of the Republic of India, where for the last 2 months, cries are echoing, innocent people are being killed!! In two days, a great man will be seen waving his hands in front of the crowd at the American White House and preaching peace to the countries affected by violence, after leaving the country in these circumstances. In a democracy where the Opposition is rotten and dead, and the majority are political slaves, it is natural for such situations to arise.”

He shared the tweet on June 18 and since then his tweet has received over 61,000 views and has been retweeted over 1,000 times. (Archive)

Several other users shared the same image on Twitter and Facebook claiming that the image is from Manipur.

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Fact Check

We ran a reverse image search on the viral image and found several social media posts from 2021 that carried this image. Most of these post had captions in Burmese, the official language of Myanmar. Some even claimed that this visual is from Khayan Township, Yangon and condemned the People’s Defence Force (PDF) — the armed wing of the Myanmar government. Some others shared the image relating it to a case of domestic violence.

Facebook page သတင်းစုံ shared the image on September 30, 2021, with a caption in Burmese that says that this breastfeeding mother, a resident of Khayan Township, was apparently attacked by PDF members. The ‘page transparency‘ section shows the profile is primarily managed from Myanmar.

We also came across a fact-check report by Fact Crescendo from October 2021. The report refuted the claim that the woman in the image was attacked by PDF members or that it was from Myanmar. It also carried a Facebook post from a page called Khayan Channel which regularly shared updates regarding Khayan Township in Myanmar. This post stated that the photo was originally from Thailand.

The oldest instance of the image that we could find is from September 28, 2021, shared on Facebook by a user called Thol Bena. The caption was written in Khmer, which is the official language of Cambodia.

With all the above findings, we can conclude that this image is not recent or in any way related to the ongoing unrest in Manipur. The picture is at least 2 years old and not related to the Manipur violence.