The post was shared after Philippine officials said Saudi Arabia had executed a Filipino worker despite calls from Manila (archived link).
The name of the executed Filipino and details of the crime were not released following the family’s request for privacy.
The official Saudi Press Agency reported that the execution took place on October 5 and that the worker was convicted of murdering a Saudi national.
Comments on the messages show that some users have been misled.
“It is so painful to see our fellow Filipino being executed,” one person wrote.
“As per the family’s request (sic), please delete the video,” said another.
The video has also been viewed more than 270,000 times, alongside similar false claims on Facebook and TikTok.
‘Fake execution scene’
However, a reverse Google search revealed that the photo in the clip is a cropped version of a wider-angle photo published by the European Pressphoto Agency (EPA) on October 15, 2011 (archived link).
The original photo – attributed to photographer Abir Abdullah – appears to show a person about to wield a sword at the one seen in the photo shared in the fake posts.
“Young Bangladeshi members of an organization called Magic Movement stage a mock execution scene to protest the beheading of eight Bangladeshi workers in Saudi Arabia, in front of the National Museum in Dhaka, Bangladesh on October 15, 2011,” the caption for the EPA photo read . .
“Despite Bangladesh’s repeated pleas for leniency, Saudi Arabia publicly executed eight Bangladeshi workers in the Saudi capital on October 7, 2011 for their involvement in a robbery and subsequent killing of an Egyptian guard in Riyadh in 2007.”
Below is a screenshot comparison of the photo in the fake messages (left) and the EPA image (right):
Reuters news agency also published a similar photo from the 2011 protest in Bangladesh (archived link).
Saudi Arabia executed more than 198 people in 2024, the highest number recorded in the country since 1990, according to Amnesty International (archived link).
