Fact-Check: No, These Are Not Pictures of a Pregnant, Nursing Girl From Jos
Two pictures of young girls in which one of them appears pregnant and the other is holding a baby above were merged and uploaded on Twitter recently.
The user claimed that the pictures are that of an 11-year-old girl impregnated in Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria.
The pictures, with the same claim, were also shared on Facebook and posted on different blogs including Naija Olofofo and toktok9ja.
A fact-check has shown that the claim is untrue. The girls are neither from Jos nor any other town in Nigeria. The pictures have been on the internet since 2017 with similar claims but in different countries and locations.
Using an online image comparison tool (online-image-comparison.com) revealed that the girl shown as pregnant in one picture is different from the other one shown carrying a baby.
Full text
The two pictures were uploaded to Twitter and generated more than one thousand reactions.
The user named brooda John with a username @Nigeriangod_ tweeted that “A 11yrs old girl gives birth to a baby in Jos😩🤦, all this pedophilic acts just have to stop”
A user with name Duke (@Duke_CN) replied to the tweet saying “They will put a minor to death for blasphemy and turn around and endorse raping minors in the name of marriage.
Make it make sense,” referring to the Muslim dominated northern Nigeria.
Another user with the name Adeosun Adekunle (@brov_qhuns) added that “You only need to imagine the level of human cruelty a lot of this (sic) things happen without anyone reporting to the right people.”
VERIFICATION: Not the Same Girl
After comparing the two pictures, an online image comparison tool has shown that the two girls are different. A closer look at the two pictures also confirmed that the two girls are entirely different; the pregnant girl is visibly shorter and darker than the girl carrying a wrapped baby.
The pictures of the two girls have also been on the internet since 2017 with the same claim but about different locations.
An online medium, Gist Lover, in November 2017 had claimed that the girl “was pregnant by his (sic) brother-in-law, a criminal named Moussa Oule, aged 50 from gueckedou (sic)”, a town in Southern Guinea, near the Sierra Leone border.
The picture was also uploaded again on Facebook with the name Nakaiba Islamic School Civic Education Department in December 2017, with the claim that the girl was impregnated by her stepbrother in Uganda.
Conclusion
The claim that the pictures uploaded to social media are of the same girl from Jos in Plateau State is false.
This fact-check is produced per HumAngle partnership with the Dubawa 2020 Fellowship to facilitate the ethos of “truth” in journalism and enhance media literacy in Nigeria
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