Fact Check: Picture of Bangkok demonstration viral in the name of COVID deaths in Sri Lanka

New Delhi (Vishvas News). A picture is going viral on social media, in which many dead bodies like things wrapped in plastic can be seen piled up. It is being claimed with the viral post that these are the bodies of people killed by COVID in Sri Lanka. Vishvas News found that the claim made with the viral image is false. Fake corpse bags used during protests in Thailand are being shared as COVID deaths in Sri Lanka.

What’s in the viral post?

Facebook user ‘The Wes – වෙස්’ shared this picture and wrote a caption in Sinhala language, which translates to Hindi: Do you think it was packed chickens. No, these are the people who died of corona.

The archived version of the post can be viewed here.

Investigation

Vishvas News first searched this viral image with the help of Google reverse image search. We found this picture in some media reports. This image was found in a report published on 19 July 2021 at worldofbuzz.com. According to the news ” Thais have taken to the streets in their motorcycles and cars to protest on 18 July against their Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha for mishandling the pandemic in their nation.” According to the news, the picture is from Bangkok.

We also found a video of the incident in a tweet by the Thai Enquirer, with the caption, ” Protesters arrive at Democracy Monument today ahead of planned rallies. Mock bodies have been piled up at the protest site to show the lives lost because of the government’s poor covid response. Despite the threat of covid, ppl are gathering..”

We reached out to reporter James Wilson of Thai Inquirer about this. He told us “This picture is from a demonstration in Bangkok on July 18. The protesters tried to show the corona deaths in the country through these mock body bags.”

Now it was time to scan the profile of the user, who shared the picture on Facebook. On scanning the profile, we found that this page has 311,954 followers.