Image of honour killing victim from Telangana is passed off as Pulwama attack martyr - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
February 15, 2021
A post accompanying the image of a toddler looking at a photo frame of a young man is being shared with a claim that the young man is a victim of the 2019 Pulwama terrorist attack and that the toddler is his son. Through this article let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Image of 2019 Pulwama attack victim.
Fact: The young man in the image is actually an honour killing victim, who was allegedly killed by goons hired by his father-in-law back in 2018 in Telangana’s Nalgonda district. The woman in the post is his wife and the photo was clicked on their son’s first birthday. The image has nothing to do with the Pulwama attack.  Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Reverse image search of the photo in the post yielded us many YouTube videos and social media posts in which the same image is featured. One such YouTube video titled ‘Amrutha Pranay Son Birthday Celebrations Special Video | Amrutha Pranay Son Nihan Latest Pics’ which shared the same image as in the post can be seen here.
Taking a cue from the YouTube video, Google search with relevant keywords yielded us multiple news articles and videos which reported the images of a young man and women as seen in the image in the post. According to BBC’s article dated 20 September 2018, the man seen in the photo is Pranay, a victim of honour killing, who was killed in Telangana’s Nalgonda district back in 2018 by goons hired by his father-in-law. The young woman seen in the image in the post is Amrutha, wife of Pranay. News articles by NDTV and Hindustan Times about this incident can be read here and here.
Further search led us to verified YouTube channel of ‘Amrutha Pranay’.  As per this channel the viral image was clicked on their son’s first birthday.
In view of the second anniversary of Pulwama terrorist attack in which 40 Indian soldiers were killed on 14 February 2019, posts like these are being shared on social media with misleading claims. The images of the CRPF jawans who were martyred in the Pulwama attack can be found in the tweet made by CRPF’s official Twitter account. The image of the young man seen in the post is not featured in this list of martyred soldiers. From all these, it is evident that the young man in the post is not a Pulwama martyr.
Bravehearts of CRPF who made the supreme sacrifice and attained martyrdom in the Pulwama attack on 14/02/2019. pic.twitter.com/eHrPnYaSGV
When the same image went viral with the same claim back in 2020 FACTLY wrote an article debunking the claim. That fact-check can be read here.
To sum it up, image of honour killing victim from Telangana is passed off as Pulwama attack martyr.