A report that claimed parents are placing padlocks on the graves of their daughters in Pakistan to guard against necrophilia has been contradicted by a fact-checking site. Many news sites, including NDTV, ran news agency ANI's report quoting the Daily Times.
The Daily Times quoted a viral tweet by Harris Sultan, an ex-Muslim atheist activist and the author of the book "The Curse of God, why I left Islam".
In the tweet, he had shared photos of a padlocked grave and accused Pakistan of creating a "sexually frustrated society", where "people are now putting padlocks on the graves of their daughters to prevent them from getting raped".
AltNews fact-checker Mohammed Zubair tweeted that the photograph used in the story, showing a green grille, was from Hyderabad. The reason grilles are used is to stop people from burying bodies over older graves without permission, he tweeted quoting locals.
The grave was that of an old woman whose son had installed the grille. It was also meant to stop people from stepping on the grave since it was near a doorway, he tweeted.
After the fact-check by AltNews, Harris Sultan said he was deleting his earlier tweet.
The ANI report claimed women's bodies were said to have been unearthed and desecrated on several occasions. A necrophilia case was reported in Pakistan in 2011 when a grave keeper named Muhammad Rizwan from North Nazimabad, Karachi was arrested after he confessed to raping 48 female corpses.
ANI put out a new story last night saying the image related to the necrophilia news article from Pakistan, which was reported earlier by Daily Times, "was wrong as the image was of a grave from India's Hyderabad". The story referred to a tweet.
The news agency said the editorial of Daily Times "had not been taken down or debunked at the time of publishing this update", however, videos and pictures have fact-checked the representative picture of the locked grave used in the story, as that of being from Hyderabad and not Pakistan. It said the pictures of the locked grave were uploaded by Pakistan Twitter users.