A set of screenshots, which purportedly show X (formerly Twitter) posts by former Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and caretaker PM Anwaar Ul Haq Kakar, is being shared on social media.
What is in the screenshots?: Screenshots of both posts condole the demise of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim, while calling him someone who was important for Pakistan and its people.
An archived version of this post can be seen here.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here, here, and here.)
Why is this being shared?: The claim comes after unverified reports of the gangster being hospitalised emerged on 18 December, which stated that Ibrahim was admitted to a hospital in Karachi after being poisoned by unknown persons.
Did they really share these posts?: No, there is no evidence to support the claim that Sharif and Kakar shared posts confirming or condoling Ibrahim's death.
Both posts are fake and have been created digitally.
How did we find out?: We started off by looking up recent news reports using both leaders' names.
However, we did not find any credible report that Shehbaz Sharif or Anwaar Ul Haq Kakar shared posts related to Dawood Ibrahim.
Did they share posts about the gangster?: We followed a series of steps to determine whether either of them had shared such posts dated 18 December (as seen in the screenshot) on their X accounts.
Former Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif
First, we went through Sharif's official X account, which uses the handle '@CMShehbaz', but did not find the post seen in the claim.
At the time of writing this report, the only post Sharif shared on 18 December was one which congratulated the "government and the people of Qatar on the momentous occasion of National Day of the State of Qatar."
The only post Sharif shared on 18 December was about Qatar.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
We looked for archived versions of his X posts to ensure that Sharif had not initially shared the post and deleted it later. We did not see any post related to Dawood Ibrahim here.
Using a social media analytics website Social Blade, we looked for details about posts and followers on the '@CMSharif' account.
Here, we noticed that this account had not deleted any posts since 5 December 2023.
Sharif's official account did not delete any posts.
(Source: Social Blade/Altered by The Quint)
Pakistan's Caretaker PM Anwaar Ul Haq Kakar
We looked for Kakar's verified X account, which took us a profile which showed a similar screen name and profile photo as seen in the viral claim.
However, we noticed a discrepancy between the username in the claim and Kakar's actual username.
Which his original account reflects the username '@anwaar_kakar', the post in the claim shows it as '@anwaar_kakkar'.
We also saw that the account impersonating Kakar had '(fans)' written after its screen name, indicating that it was a fan account.
The account in the viral post shows a fan account created in Kakar's name.
(Source: X/Altered by The Quint)
Kakar's verified account had not shared any posts on 18 December, at the time of writing this report. His latest post, dated 16 December, condoled the death of the later Emir of Kuwait Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah.
Kakar's last post, dated 16 December, was about the Emir of Kuwait's passing.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
Following similar steps, we looked for archives of Kakar's account to check if Kakar had shared posts about Dawood Ibrahim and then deleted them, but this search did not return any relevant results.
In Kakar's case, Social Blade showed similar results, confirming that Kakar did not post (and then delete) anything about the gangster.
Kakar's official account did not delete any posts.
(Source: Social Blade/Altered by The Quint)
Conclusion: Both screenshots are fake. Neither Kakar nor Sharif shared X posts confirming or mourning gangster Dawood Ibrahim's death.
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