Photos show former Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, voting from prison in Pakistan’s general election in February 2024.
False. The photos show Mr Khan casting votes for a presidential election in September 2018 and a by-election in October 2018.
Photos claiming to show Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, casting a vote from jail in the country’s recent general election have been circulating online. But the photos actually date from 2018.
Imran Khan was elected as Prime Minister in 2018 but was removed from office following a vote of no confidence in April 2022. He was sentenced to three years in prison in August 2023 on charges of corruption and was disqualified from politics for five years. He has since been handed further jail time.
Several posts share a collage of two images showing Mr Khan appearing to post a vote through a ballot box. One post says: “Imran Khan has cast his vote from Adiala Jail”, a prison near Islamabad where he has reportedly been held since September 2023.
These photos do not show Mr Khan casting a vote from prison in 2024.
One of the photos was shared by verified Facebook pages for both Mr Khan and his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), on 14 October 2018. Similar images were shared that same day in a news report by a Pakistani media outlet with the caption: “Imran Khan Cast His Vote In NA-53 Constituency | By-Election 2018”.
It’s been reported that Mr Khan voted via postal ballot from jail during the recent general election, which took place on 8 February 2024.
Independent candidates linked to Mr Khan and the PTI party won the largest number of seats in the general election but no group won a simple majority. At the time of writing, it is still not clear which party will form Pakistan’s next government and who the next prime minister will be.
Nationwide protests have broken out over allegations of vote rigging after mobile phone networks were suspended by the government on election day and the vote counting took more than two days.
Full Fact often sees old images and videos being shared on social media with claims they show recent or current events, for example an image of babies in an incubator in Gaza from 2017 and videos of a tsunami in Japan that was actually from 2011.
It’s always worth checking if social media posts show what they claim to show before sharing them—we’ve written a guide on how to do so.
Image courtesy of Jawad Zakariya
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because the photos date back to 2018 and do not show Imran Khan casting a vote from prison.
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