Fact Check: This lion did not attack a church leader, it’s a scene from a film

New Delhi (Vishvas Team) A photo is going viral on social media in which a lion can be seen attacking a man. Photo’s caption reads: ” Church Leader Mauled By Lion After Trying To Prove God Would Intervene.” The post further states ” A Christian church leader tried to prove that the Lord would step forward and come to his rescue and save him recently when he went up against a lion. Things did not go as planned.” In our investigation we found that this picture is a screenshot of a movie scene. The claim that this lion attacked a church leader is wrong.

CLAIM

In a viral photo a lion can be seen attacking a man. Photo’s caption reads: ” Church Leader Mauled By Lion After Trying To Prove God Would Intervene.” The post further states ” A Christian church leader tried to prove that the Lord would step forward and come to his rescue and save him recently when he went up against a lion. Things did not go as planned.”

FACT CHECK

To start your investigation we analyzed this photo properly. The person can be seen carrying a shotgun in the photo. This person seems to be a forest officer, not a church pastor.

When we Google searched with the key words “A christian church leader tried to prove that the lord will step forward” we found a news report on a website called The Voyager Channel, whose headline was “Poacher killed and devoured by a Pride of Lions after he killed their Cub “. The viral picture was also used in this article. It was mentioned in the article that this incident is from the Ingwelala Private Nature Reserve in South Africa. According to this news, the person mauled by the lion was a hunter. There is no cognizance of church leader or pastor anywhere in the news.

For confirmation, we spoke with Ingwelala Reserve’s  Manager John Llewellyn who told us that he did not remember any such incident happened in the reserve. Viral photos are not of their reserve. Although he said that a hunter was indeed mauled by a lion in his reserve in 2017, but he had no connection with the church.

For detailed investigation, we took a screenshot of this picture and searched it on Google reverse image. After some research we found a video. This video is the trailer of 1981 movie ‘Roar’. The movie was released in Europe in 1981 and in America in 2015. The screenshot can be seen below. It is obvious that the viral image is a screenshot from this movie.

This post was shared by a Facebook page called The Hypernationalist. The page has 7,225 Followers.

Conclusion: In our investigation we found that this picture is a screenshot of a movie scene. The claim that this lion attacked a church leader is wrong.

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