A blurred image is being shared on the internet to claim that a girl was recently found dead near seashore in Maldives.
Those sharing the image have uploaded it with a caption that said, "A girl who went on a trip to the Maldives was found dead naked near the seashore. She was gang-raped and tortured before being killed!."
An archive of the post can be found here.
(Source: X (formerly Twitter)/Screenshot)
The post had garnered over a lakh views on the platform.
(Archives of similar claims can be found here, here, and here.)
What is the truth?: The image dates back to August 2022 and is from Thailand. It reportedly showed a hyper-realistic sex doll that was found washed up on the beach in the Bang Sean district of Chonburi.
What led us to the truth?: We performed a Google Lens search on the image and came across the same visual shared in a report published on Metro UK.
The report said that tourists in Thailand stumbled across what they thought was a nude corpse on the beach. The images were taken on Bang Saen beach in the Thai province of Chon Buri.
It mentioned that police rushed to the scene after being alerted by the tourists. However, the police found that it was a realistic sex doll without a head.
It further said that the police believed that the doll might have been dumped in a river or a canal and had ended up being washed up on the beach.
The report was published on 23 August 2022.
(Source: Metro UK/Screenshot)
Other news reports: Mirror UK reported that the police found a silicone sex doll washed up on the sand on the afternoon of 18 August 2022. The officers identified the body as a "hyper-realistic Japanese 'AV idol' sex doll."
A district police spokesperson said that rescue teams were informed about a young woman naked and unconscious on 18 August 2022.
When the officers rushed to check, they found the body to be an AV doll.
Similar news reports were found on Daily Star, India Today, Daily Mail, and NDTV World.
Conclusion: An unrelated image is being shared to falsely claim that a young woman was recently found dead in the Maldives.
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