Crying child in rubble, old man in tears: Old photos recirculated as 'aftermath of Turkey earthquake' images

"Photos of the site of the tragic Turkey earthquake. They say the number of dead has reached 1,800 and they can't estimate how much more there will be," reads a Korean-language post shared alongside the photos here on Facebook on February 7, 2023.

The post has been shared more than 50 times.

It includes four photos that appear to show a dog sitting beside a person apparently crushed by rubble; a boy sitting among rubble with his head in his hands; an elderly man shedding tears as he carries several loaves of bread near in front of a wrecked building; and a heavily damaged building apparently being demolished by an excavator.

The photos circulated after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked part of eastern Turkey and northern Syria on February 6, killing thousands of people and felling thousands of buildings.

As of February 7, the death toll had soared above 5,200 but there are fears that toll will rise inexorably, with World Health Organization officials estimating up to 20,000 may have died.

The same photos were shared alongside identical claims on several South Korean internet forums. One or several of these same photos were also shared with similar English-language claims from users in Pakistan, India and the UK.

But the photos have all circulated in reports and stock photo websites before the February 6 earthquake.

Dog photo

A reverse image search on Google of the picture of the dog led to this photo on the stock image website Shutterstock which is attributed to Czech photographer Jaroslav Noska.

The caption of the photo reads: "Dog looking for injured people in ruins after earthquake." It is one of several in a collection named "Dog rescue", which was last updated on January 3, 2019.

The same image was also published on stock image websites Bigstock here and Alamy here, which says it was taken on October 18, 2018.

Below is a screenshot comparison between the photo shared in the false posts (left) and the photo as it appears on the Shutterstock website (right):

AFP previously debunked similar posts that claimed the same photo showed a dog searching for its family after an earthquake hit the city of Izmir in Turkey on October 30, 2020, leading to more than 90 deaths.

Photo of young child

The image that appears to show a crying boy also corresponds to a stock image published on Shutterstock, captioned "boy crying among the ruins".

Shutterstock also hosts several similar images, including here and here, whose captions say it shows a father and son among the ruins of a destroyed building. The photos are all credited to Zapylaieva Hanna, a Ukrainian photographer.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo shared in the false post (left) and the corresponding photo on Shutterstock (right):

The same photo was also published on Adobe Stock and has been used in multiple websites and social media posts that predate the earthquake that struck Turkey and Syria in February, including here in an article from November 2020.

Elderly man photo

The image of an elderly man carrying what appear to be loaves of bread was published in a Turkish-language news report from CNN Turk after a 6.1-magnitude earthquake that hit the town of Duzce in northern Turkey on November 23, 2022.

The report, however, refers to an earlier, larger, and more devastating 7.2-earthquake that hit the same area on November 12, 1999, and killed more than 17,000 people.

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