Lighthouse Journalism came across a post being widely shared on social media platforms. The post appeared to be a screenshot from The Washington Post article. The article was titled: An assassination plot on US soil reveals a darker side: Pannun may have staged an attack on himself to implicate India. The following body of the article said, “In reports that have been closely held within the American government, U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Pannun could have staged an attack on himself. After one year of probe no Indian angle has been found yet to reach a conclusion that India was involved in the attack.” Gurpatwant Singh Pannun is one of the main leaders of Khalistan movement. During the investigation we found that the viral screenshot was edited.
Claim:
X user Arun Pudur shared the screenshot on his profile.
Check the archive version of the claim here.
Other users too are sharing the same screenshot.
Investigation:
We noticed several grammatical errors in the article, which suggested that the article could not have been published with so many errors in The Washington Post.
We then did a Google keyword search on the headline of the article, but we found an article that had a similar headline but different content.
The article was titled: An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India
The story however published was different.
The first paragraph was different as seen in the viral image, the original article mentioned: The White House went to extraordinary lengths last year to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a state visit meant to bolster ties with an ascendant power and potential partner against China.
In the article we also found a post by Garry Shih, Washington Post India bureau chief on X.
He confirmed that the article is not a story by The Washington Post and that it was photoshopped.
Conclusion: A screenshot of an edited article from The Washington Post falsely claiming that Gurpatwant Singh Pannun staged an attack on himself to implicate India has gone viral. The screenshot is fake.
