Just like several other times, Pakistan tried to tarnish India’s image for alleged atrocities in Jammu and Kashmir yet again. But this attempt by Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s representative to the UN, showed a fake image of a “pellet gun victim” in the UN General Assembly.
While exercising the right to reply, Maleeha Lodhi responded to Sushma Swaraj’s hard-hitting speech terming Pakistan as an “exporter of terrorism”. In her reply, Lodhi said that the “core issue” of Kashmir was deliberately skirted by India at the UN General Assembly.
Maleeha Lodhi at UNGA Twitter
In the middle of her speech, Lodhi while showing a picture of a woman whose face was dotted with injuries said,
This is the face of Indian democracy.
In her reply to Indian FM’s speech in UNGA, Amb. Lodhi showed a pic of pellet gun injured women frm Kashmir saying this is the face of India pic.twitter.com/StuG3arPoN
— Pakistan Mission UN (@PakistanUN_NY) September 24, 2017
However, it was later known that the woman who was brandished as a “pellet gun victim” was actually Rawya abu Jom’a, a 17-year-old Gazan woman who had suffered injuries by shrapnel during an airstrike by Israeli forces. The picture was taken in 2014 by Heidi Levine, a photojournalist, while she was covering the Gaza war, two years before there was unrest in Kashmir over the killing of Burhan Wani in an encounter by India’s security forces.
The same was published in The Guardian on July 22, 2014, a screenshot of which can be seen below.
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Other online galleries had also carried this image back in 2014. Though the use of pellet guns by India in 2016 had invited strong criticism as it had reportedly caused injuries, and cases of partial or complete blindness, but the woman in the picture showed by Lodhi was not a victim of pellet guns.
In her speech at the UNGA, Maleeha Lodhi had also called the Modi government one with a “racist and fascist” ideology and referred to Yogi Adityanath as a “fanatic”.
It is noteworthy that Maleeha Lodhi is a former journalist and is expected to follow the basics of fact-checking. She also has the accolade of being the founding editor of Pakistan’s leading English daily, The News, and the first woman in Asia to become the editor of a national daily newspaper as per the website of Pakistan’s Mission to the UN.
Have a look at the screenshots of Maleeha Lodhi’s profile at the Pakistan’s Mission To United Nations website below.
The twitter page of Pakistan’s Mission UN also in a tweet bragged about Maleeha Lodhi showing a picture of a “pellet gun victim” at the UN and the same was retweeted by several others. Pakistan Defense and some media houses failed to check facts reporting that Lodhi hit back at Swaraj.
Pakistan Defense retweeted Pakistan Mission UN’s tweet IndiaToday
Pakistan wants India to be declared as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.
