Claim
Last week, a photo of a padlocked grave with a metal grate was being widely shared on social media and in news reports. It was being reported that the grave was in Pakistan and was the result of purported increase in necrophilia cases. The claim suggests that the grave is an illustration of how Pakistani mothers use locks to secure the graves of their daughters and protect the corpse from being raped.
Indian media outlets also carried the story.
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Fact
Indian fact-checker Mohammed Zubair has said that the photo is, in fact, from Hyderabad city in India. “The image used by the media outlets was actually from a cemetery in Hyderabad. The cemetery is located opposite Masjid E Salar Mulk, a mosque in Darab Jung Colony, Madannapet, Hyderabad,” read the fact check piece written by Mohammed Zubair and Shinjine Majumder.
“Alt News also spoke to a local resident whose house is near the mosque. He informed us that the grave belonged to an aged woman who had passed away in her seventies. Her son constructed the grille over the grave about 40 days after she had been buried.”
The grill and padlock was installed to stop the grave from being reopened to put a fresh corpse inside.
Several indian media outlets picked up the story while crediting Twitter for the image. The picture ANI picked up was tweeted by author Harris Sultan. He has now deleted the tweet.
The EU DisinfoLab in a report published this year said that ANI repeatedly quotes non-existent bloggers, experts, journalists and think tanks spreading anti-Pakistan/China narratives in India.
Verdict
The claim is false.
