Image of an American actor ‘Ian Michael Nelson’ is being shared with a false narrative

An image of a boy is being shared widely across Facebook. The claim is that the boy is Sami Abu Dyak (aged – 17 years) and he died in Israeli prison today due to medical negligence after being incarcerated for 11 years. Let’s check the authenticity of the claim.

The archived version of the post can be found here.

Claim: The boy in the image is Sami Abu Dyak (aged -17 yrs) and he died in Israeli prison today due to medical negligence after being incarcerated for 11 years.
Fact: The boy in the image is American actor ‘Ian Nelson’ and he is active in movies for the past 9 years. A man named ‘Sami Abu Dyak’ died of cancer in an Israeli prison but his age is 36 years. So, the claim is FALSE.

When the image in the post is subjected to Google reverse image search technique, many search results were obtained. The search result of Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online database of information related to films had the same image in the photo gallery of ‘Ian Michael Nelson’. When we went through the biography of Ian Nelson, he was found to be an actor and producer, well known for the movies ‘The Boy Next Door (2015)’ and ‘The Hunger Games (2012)’. More images of Ian Nelson can be seen on his Instagram account.

Through the Wikipedia page of Ian Michael Nelson, it was found that he is an American actor who has been active in movies since 2011. Also, no news reports were found about his death.

When searched about ‘Sami Abu Dyak’ on Google, many news articles about his death were found in the search results. But, he is not the one shown in the photo and his age is 36 years, not 17 years. According to an article in ‘Middle East Eye’, Sami Abu Diyak was ‘suffering from terminal cancer and had been refused compassionate leave to be with his family’.