As many states have imposed lockdown in order to curb the spread of COVID-19, an image showing legs of men and women clamped to a plank is being shared across social media platforms with a claim suggesting that the image is from Thailand. Let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Image showing police clamping lockdown violators legs to a wooden plank in Thailand.
Fact: This image actually shows the police clamping lockdown violators’ legs to a wooden plank back in 2020 in Colombia. Many news agencies have reported this incident. The image has nothing to do with Thailand. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
This image of people clamped to a plank is actually from Colombia where the police locked people to deter them from entering the streets during the lockdown back in 2020. Reverse image search of this photo in the post led us to the same photo on Wikimedia commons. Metadata of this image on wiki confirms that the image is from Colombia and dates back to 11 April 2020.
Taking a cue from Wikimedia, further search with relevant keywords yielded multiple 2020 Brazilian news articles suggesting that this image is from Colombia. According to these articles, police in Tuchín, Córdoba, Colombia, punished residents for violating the restrictions by clamping them to wooden planks. These news articles can be read here, here, and here.
Few more images of similar punishments in Colombia can be seen here. All these suggest that this image has nothing to do with Thailand.
To sum it up, this image shows punishment for lock down violations in Colombia, not Thailand.
