A photo from Iran shows a woman about to be stoned to death under sharia law being fed a spoonful of water.
This isn’t what the picture shows. It is actually a 2003 protest in Colombia where three people were voluntarily buried as part of a demonstration against the government.
Posts with an image of a woman buried neck-deep in the ground falsely claiming to show the moments before she is stoned to death under sharia law have been circulating online again.
Text within the picture shared on Facebook, which has also been shared over 2,600 times on X (formerly Twitter), says: “A woman just before being stoned to death in Iran under Shariah laws. At some places on this earth, women’s rights are limited to getting a spoonful of water before stoning.”
While the use of stoning as a punishment does occur in Iran—with human rights organisations documenting 150 people stoned to death between 1980 and 2009—this isn’t what the image shows, and Full Fact previously debunked it when it was shared widely in 2019.
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The photo was not taken in Iran, but at a 2003 protest in Cali, in south-west Colombia.
During a demonstration several people buried themselves in the ground to protest the failure by the government to relocate displaced people to a safer part of the city of Cali.
Captions of other photographs of the protest identify the woman as Maria Gabriela Ruiz, and another image shows her also being given food or water while buried, alongside two men who are buried.
Miscaptioned images like these can spread misleading information when shared unchecked. We’ve written a guide on how to identify misleading images online here.
Image courtesy of Ben Bowes
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 false because the image does not show the moments before a woman is stoned to death in Iran, but a protest in Colombia.
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