Death of Pakistani in mosque falsely portrayed as incident in Bangladesh

A photo of a man lying motionless on the ground was repeatedly shared in Facebook posts falsely claiming he died while making the Muslim call to prayer in southeastern Bangladesh. A family member of the deceased and a local police spokesman told AFP he was actually from Muzaffargarh, a city in the Pakistani state of Punjab.

Graphic warning: story includes images of a dead person

“A muazzin named Saeed Ullah died while calling for prayers in a mosque in Sonagazi in Feni. May Allah (God) accept his death as a martyr, Ameen,” read the Bengali-language caption alongside a Facebook post dated June 10, 2024.

It shows a photograph of a motionless man lying on the floor of a room, clutching a microphone stand.

Feni is a southeastern district of Bangladesh.

The same photo with a similar claim was shared in Facebook posts here and here.

Some users also falsely claimed that the person pictured was from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

However, AFP traced the photo to an incident in a city in Pakistan’s most populous state, Punjab.

Wasim Gopang, spokesman for the Muzaffargarh police department, told AFP that the man in the photo died of electrocution in a mosque in the city.

Pakistani Mosque

A reverse image search on Google revealed a higher resolution version of the photo in a Facebook post published on June 8, 2024 by a Muzaffargarh-based user (archived link).

The post’s caption identified the person as Maulana Masood Azhar, a man who died from electrocution while leading prayers at a mosque.

The caption also mentioned that Masood was the son of Maulana Muhammad Asgar Qureshi, a teacher at a local Islamic seminary called Jamia Anwarul Koran.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo shared in the fake post (left) and the photos posted by a user based in Pakistan (right):

The Pakistani who shared the image, Hafeez Malik, told AFP that the person pictured was Maulana Masood Azhar from Ghazi Ghat village in Muzaffargarh.

“He was our neighbor. This brother died of electrocution during Asr prayers in a local mosque,” Malik said.

The Asr prayer is the third obligatory daily prayer in Islam.

An AFP journalist also contacted Najaf Ali Abbas Qureshi, who said the man in the photo was his cousin and was working as an imam at a mosque in Muzaffargarh when he was electrocuted.

“He died on the spot,” Qureshi said.