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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Crime & justice fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about crime & justice. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

6,836 published reviews in this topic

dpaCrime & justice

Le procureur de la CPI inscrit sur la liste internationale des personnes recherchées après un mandat d'arrêt délivré contre Poutine.

Publisher’s rating: L'homme sur la photo est Karim Khan, le procureur - et non pas juge - de la Cour pénale internationale (CPI), située à La Haye. Ce dernier a récemment été ajouté à une liste de personnes recherchées en Russie, selon de nombreux médias qui ont rapporté la nouvelle. Cet évènement intervient après que la CPI a émis un mandat d'arrêt à l'encontre de Vladimir Poutine, pour crimes de guerre. Mais Karim Khan n'est pas recherché à l'échelle internationale.

Soch Fact CheckCrime & justice

A young student, who was reportedly one of the people who stole peacocks from a Pakistan Army housing compound during the protests against the arrest of Imran Khan, “has been sentenced to 10 years jail”.

Publisher’s rating: False

The claim concerned a young man described online as an F.Sc student who was allegedly sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking a peacock from a Pakistan Army housing compound during protests following Imran Khan’s arrest. Soch Fact Check traced the claim to a tweet posted on 18 May 2023, which said the student’s final exams were a week away. The tweet was later deleted, but the review says it had circulated on other platforms. The review does not establish that the young man stole a peacock; it investigates whether the asserted sentence had been handed down. [S1: “On 18 May 2023, Twitter user @Yousafzais_ posted a tweet claiming (archive) that a young man was arrested and handed a 10-year prison sentence for allegedly stealing a peacock”] To check the sentencing claim, the fact-checker searched for legitimate news coverage and spoke with constitutional lawyer Usama Khawar, who teaches at LUMS. Khawar said the army’s media wing, ISPR, ordinarily announces sentences and gives at least basic information about the person, charge and punishment. He also cautioned that the process was opaque and that he could not say with certainty whether a trial had started or anyone had been sentenced. The review reported that it had found no legitimate news publications reporting such a sentence and that ISPR had made no announcement. [S1: “Ordinarily, [the] ISPR makes an announcement after a person has been sentenced, with bare minimum information [including] the name of the persons sentenced, charge, and sentence.”] [S1: “Soch Fact Check has not come across any legitimate news publications reporting about anyone being sentenced, as of writing time.”] The review also noted that another lawyer, Barrister Salahuddin Ahmed, considered conviction in the claimed short timeframe implausible. This supports the review’s conclusion that the tweet’s assertion was unsubstantiated, not proof that the student had been convicted or sentenced. [S1: “Impossible that he could’ve been convicted in barely a week. Even a military court doesn’t proceed that fast.”]

Fact Crescendo Sri LankaCrime & justice

වැලිගම ප්‍රදේශයේ පියෙකු, තම දියණිය රෙදි සෝදන යන්ත්‍රයකට දමා මරුමුවට පත් කළ පුවතේ ඇත්ත, නැත්ත!

Publisher’s rating: False

The claim described a child named Dilushika Leoni being killed by her father in Weligama, Matara district, after he put her in a washing machine. The post also alleged that the parents offered a false account of her death and that the child’s sister exposed what happened. Fact Crescendo checked whether an incident matching that account had been reported in the area and asked the Weligama police station’s officer-in-charge about it. The review says no such report was found in mainstream media, and the officer said no complaint of this kind had been made. The officer also confirmed that neither a child being put in a washing machine nor a child falling from an apartment and later drowning while bathing had been reported from the area. The review then used reverse-image searching to trace the photograph shared with the post. It identified the child in the images not as a Sri Lankan girl from Weligama, but as four-year-old Minsa, who died in Qatar. According to the review, she was found unconscious after being left inside a school bus for more than four hours on her birthday, September 11, 2022; the bus staff’s negligence and the heat were reported as contributing circumstances. Thus the image was from a different child’s death, not evidence of the alleged Weligama incident. The review also traced details in the washing-machine story to a separate case in France. It reports that a father was accused in connection with the 2011 death of his three-year-old son, Bastian, and that the account included details resembling those in the social-media post, including the child’s sister speaking up and the father’s account that the child had fallen and drowned. The review’s conclusion is that the post combined that French case’s narrative with images of Minsa, falsely presenting them as a killing in Weligama.

Fact Crescendo Sri LankaCrime & justice

ගාල්ල අක්මීමන පාසල් ළමුන් පැහැර ගැනීමක් සිදුව ඇති බවට හුවමාරු වන ප්‍රචාර අසත්‍යයි!

Publisher’s rating: False

The review examined social-media posts claiming that a group had tried to abduct schoolchildren in Akmeemana, Galle, and warning parents, teachers and children to be alert. The posts also attributed the warning to Akmeemana Police. The review says the messages had spread widely and caused concern among parents, then checked the claims with local police and education officials. Akmeemana’s police station chief told the reviewers that police had issued no such warning and that no such incident had occurred in the area; he described the posts as fabricated. Police Media Spokesperson Nihal Thalduwa also said the posts were false. The review additionally reports that a Galle education official responsible for schools in the area said the claims were untrue, that her office had received no reports from principals or parents, and that police had confirmed no incident to her. Other southern education officials and Galle principals contacted by the reviewers likewise reported no verified incident. The review notes that an image circulated with the posts was also used in claims about alleged abductions in northern and eastern areas, and that it was being linked online to an incident in Kottawa, Akmeemana. It distinguishes the Galle claim from reports of complaints in Mannar: the review says investigators had not found reliable supporting evidence for those complaints either. Its conclusion is that the claim of an attempted schoolchild abduction in Akmeemana was false.