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Warning: Content in this report may be distressing. Just 15 minutes after a five-year-old child was raped in Dubai, the judiciary ordered the police to shoot the rapist in public. That’s the claim in a graphic posted on Facebook in South Africa on 14 August 2022. It appears to have also been doing the rounds on WhatsApp . The graphic includes a blurry photo of a uniformed man pointing a rifle down at another man dressed all in blue and lying on a chequered red and white blanket in a public square. A large crowd of people look on. A search of Facebook led us to several other instances of the claim , some dating back to 2018 . They include a video clip from which the photo was taken . It shows the same man in blue on a chequered blanket. The same soldier shoots him five times with an AK-47 rifle. The man’s body is then strung up on a crane. A typical caption to the video reads: 5 year old was raped in Dubai...Within 15 minutes of this rape incident, the judiciary ordered the police to shoot the rapist in public view. It adds: This is what South Africa should do with the criminals of this country. Dubai is a city and emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country in the east of the Arabian peninsula in the Middle East. The penalty for rape in the UAE is life imprisonment, according to a new law that came into effect in January 2022 . If the victim is a minor or disabled, the rapist can be sentenced to death. But was a man publicly executed in Dubai within 15 minutes of raping a five-year-old child? And do the photo and video show the execution? Execution in Yemen’s rebel-held capital A TinEye reverse image search led us to an article on the Chinese-language website SETN , dated 1 May 2018, in which the photo appears . A machine translation of its opening paragraph reads: A 22-year-old man in Yemen was publicly executed by the government for sexual assault a few days ago. After shooting him five times in the head, he was hanged by a crane to show the public, while the crowd cheered. Yemen is a country in the south of the Arabian peninsula, about 1,300 kilometres from Dubai. The article identifies the executed man as Hussein al-Saket, who sexually assaulted and killed a five-year-old girl in November 2015. He was scheduled for a public execution in August 2017. A Google search for Hussein al-Saket Yemen execution returned several news reports from August 2017 that largely confirm SETN’s account. Some of the articles include AFP photos that show Saket , in blue, lying on the chequered blanket as the soldier points the AK-47 rifle at him. Saket was reportedly executed in Sanaa , the capital of Yemen , which has been held by Houthi rebels since 2014. He had been found guilty of the abduction, rape and murder of a young girl in 2015. She was four years old, not five. Africa Check could not find any credible news reports of a public execution in Dubai 15 minutes after a man raped a child. And the photo and video show the execution of a man found guilty of raping and murdering a child in Yemen almost two years after the crime.
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