Fact Check: AB de Villiers was not holding Lord Ganesha statue in his hands, viral image is morphed

Vishvas News (New Delhi). Amidst the Ganesh festival being celebrated across the world, a picture of former South African batsman AB de Villiers is going viral, in which he can be seen holding an idol of Lord Ganesha in his hands. In the investigation of Vishvas News, this picture was found to be edited. In the original picture, AB de Villiers was holding a trophy, not an idol of Lord Ganesha in his hand.

What is going viral?

Twitter user kevin de Villiers shared the viral picture on September 10, 2021, with the description, “Good morning and #HappyGaneshChaturthi to all my friends.”

The archived version of this post can be viewed by clicking here.

Investigation

Vishvas News first used Google reverse image search tool to probe this post. We found this picture uploaded on the official Twitter handle of ICC. AB de Villiers was holding a trophy in this picture uploaded on June 3, 2017.

We also found this picture in a news article on www.icc-cricket.com. Here too AB de Villiers had a trophy in his hands.

The similarity between both the pictures can be seen in the collage below.

We reached out to Dainik Jagran Digital’s Sports Head Viplav Kumar regarding this. When asked about this picture, he told us, “This picture was taken during the Champions Trophy tournament played in 2017. In this, AB de Villiers, who captained the South Africa team, posed with the trophy like the rest of the captains. Viral image is edited.”

We searched on the internet with the use of keyword search, but nowhere did we find any news about AB de Villiers celebrating Ganesh Utsav.

Now it was time to scan the profile of the user ‘kevin de Villiers’ who shared the post on Twitter. Upon scanning the profile, we found it to be a fan account. The user has 719 followers.