This Photo was taken at the Baghdad Museum in Iraq, not at the British Museum

An image is being shared widely across the social media platforms and the claim is that it shows Iraqi archaeologist Dr. Abdallah and Iraqi poet Amal Aljabouri crying as they saw Iraqi artefacts in a British Museum that are stolen from Iraq in 2003. Let’s check the authenticity of that claim.

An archived version of that post can be found here.

The post was originally shared in 2018 but it is being shared again and has attracted more than 29k shares till the time of writing this article.

Claim: Image of Iraqi archaeologist Dr. Abdallah and Iraqi poet Amal Aljabouri crying at a British Museum.
Fact: Image shows Iraqi man and woman crying when they visited the Assyrian gallery during a brief reopening of the Baghdad Museum in 2003 in Iraq to display the ancient Nimrud treasures. So, the claim is FALSE.

When the image in the post was subjected to Google reverse image search technique, an article of a news agency ‘Independent’ was obtained in the search results. In that article, published in November 2016, the same image was found in the gallery titled ‘The Destruction of Nimrud’. From the description of the photo, it was found that it shows an Iraqi man and woman crying in 2003 when they visited the Assyrian gallery during a brief reopening of the Baghdad Museum to display the ancient Nimrud treasure. The image had the photo credits to ‘Reuters’. So, when searched with relevant keywords in ‘Reuters pictures’, the same photo was found in its library. The information corroborated with the above finding that the image was taken at the Baghdad Museum. So, the photo wasn’t clicked at the British Museum as said in the post.

In the comments section of the post, a user Amal Al-Jabouri has written that it’s her picture and is being shared on social media with incorrect information. Amal Al-Jabouri has commented that the person seen along with her in the photo is Muwaffaq Tikriti and it was taken at Iraqi Museum in Baghdad and not at the British Museum. Amal (the website given in her comment describes her as a poet) has said that she and her colleagues started crying at the museum for the loss of Iraqi heritage and Iraqis.