Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake

 

Image of bloodied man picked up by British newspapers has been circulating online for two years
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 12.03 BST

An image purporting to show Osama bin Laden's bloody corpse, right, is a composite of two separate images, left and centre. Photograph: twitpic

An image apparently showing a dead Osama bin Laden broadcast on Pakistani television and picked up by British newspaper websites is a fake.

The bloodied image of a man with matted hair and a blank, half-opened eye has been circulating on the internet for the past two years. It was used on the front pages of the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror websites, though swiftly removed after the fake was exposed on Twitter.

It appears the fake picture was initially published by the Middle East online newspaper themedialine.org on 29 April 2009, with a warning from the editor that it was "unable to ascertain whether the photo is genuine or not".