RT state channel edited photos of refugees from Afghanistan, adding weapons to them

Russian state-run television channel RT edited photos of refugees from Afghanistan, adding weapons to them. On this noticed Twitter users.

Original photo distributed by Reuters. It captures a man and woman with children arriving at the Melsbrook military base in Belgium. This family fled Afghanistan after the Taliban entered Kabul.

The edited image appeared on RT’s official English-language account, which has almost 3 million subscribers. Kalashnikov assault rifles and a grenade launcher were attached to the backpacks of the people in the photo.

“Are some terrorists getting a free ticket from Afghanistan?” RT wrote in a tweet. “Up to 100 evacuated Afghans are on the surveillance lists of the special services,” the quote in the photo read.

It is noteworthy that the edited photo was accompanied by a vertical inscription: “Warning: the image was changed in Photoshop.” At the same time, it is not easy to see this inscription.

The tweet has now been deleted, but a copy of it survived in the web archive.

RT did not explain why it did the photomontage and why it deleted the tweet.