?:reviewBody
|
-
Posts shared thousand of times claim Indian politician Priyanka Gandhi met Pakistan’s army chief in Dubai on February 7, 2019. The claim is false; Priyanka Gandhi was in India on that date and there have been no recent reports of the army chief visiting Dubai. Priyanka Gandhi is a politician for India's opposition Congress party. She is the sister of party leader Rahul Gandhi. Pakistan's powerful army chief is called General Qamar Javed Bajwa. Multiple posts, such as this one, which has been shared around 3,300 times on Facebook since it was published on February 15, 2019, claim that the pair met in Dubai earlier this month. The posts, which appear elsewhere on Facebook, for example here , shared around 1,600 times, and on Twitter, for example here , contain writing in Hindi on a colourful background. The text says: Rahul Gandhi’s sister, Priyanka Gandhi met chief of the Pakistan Army in Dubai on February 7. Gaurav Pradhan alerted the world about it. Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post Priyanka Gandhi was in New Delhi, India on February 7, 2019, according to multiple media reports and photographs. News reports published on February 7, 2019, for example here by India Today and here by the New Indian Express, say Priyanka Gandhi attended her first political meeting that day after being assigned a senior role in the party. Here is a screenshot of the New Indian Express report, attributed to the Press Trust of India, which also contains a picture of Priyanka Gandhi at the meeting in New Delhi on February 7, 2019: Screenshot of New Indian Express report dated February 7, 2019 There are no reports that Bajwa visited Dubai on February 7, 2019 in local media or on the Pakistan Army website. Gaurav Pradhan in the misleading posts may refer to this unverified Twitter account which has 169,000 followers. But the last time the account referred to Priyanka Gandhi by name was on January 23, 2019, in this unrelated tweet about her husband. Indian fact-checking sites including AltNews and Boom have previously raised doubts over the reliability of information shared in Pradhan’s tweets. The head of social media for the Congress party, Divya Spandana, told AFP: This news is absolutely false, Priyanka was in Delhi on that day, she did not go to Dubai.
(en)
|