A Facebook page with more than 120 thousand followers shared a post on Aug 23, 2022, captioned, “ The people of Tigray in Adigrat held a rally today condemning TPLF….”
By the time this article was published the post had more than a thousand reactions and was shared more than 220 times.
However, HaqCheck inspected the images on the post and rendered them False.
The prolonged war between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the federal government, and its allied forces remained unsolved.
In a news video released on May 10, 2022, TPLF has been stating that if the diplomatic means to end the war fail, it will resort to other means indicating that it will seek military solutions. TPLF has been accusing the federal government and regional authorities of blocking aid from entering Tigray and has complained the aid that has recently reached was below that need.
On Jan 13, 2022, Field Martial Birhanu Jula of the Ethiopian Defense Forces said in an interview, “Tigray people don’t have to die for the sake of TPLF anymore, thousands of lives are lost. People of Tigray have to say no to TPLF.”
The post is then produced in the context of these situations.
HaqCheck inspected the images shared by the page and found the first image on a Facebook page with more than 22 thousand followers.
The image was shared on Sep 4, 2020, with a description of “Tigray will choose its leaders [Adigrat]. Even if the Ethiopian national election is postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic the people of Tigray are about to choose their leaders”. The post also attached 3 images.
In the effort of verifying the images, HaqCheck found the second image on a website called borkena.com in an article shared under the title “Reported clash between students, security forces in Haramaya University.”The article was shared on Jan 9, 2020.
The article stated that the university says “students in the University’s technology institute caused a disturbance around 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon, local time, and went on a vandalism spree. They destroyed two Motorbikes, a coaster van the university uses as a shuttle bus for employees, and an ATM machine belonging to the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE).”
The third image was also previously shared on a Facebook account along with the image used by Borkena [the clash between students of Haramaya university and security forces].
This image was shared on May 19, 2020, captioned, “Public protest in Tigray [Adigrat] against the TPLF administration.”
Link
Even though there had been different unconfirmed and False information about public protests of people in Tigray against the TPLF administration at different times. The images used by the page to support the claim [recent rally in Tigray] are False.Therefore HaqCheck inspected the images and rendered them False.
