In A Huge Embarrassment To Pakistan, Envoy Maleeha Lodhi Shows Fake Picture Of Kashmir Victim At UN

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While seeking to highlight alleged atrocities by Indian authorities in Kashmir, Pakistan’s top envoy at the United Nations waved a photograph of a purported “pellet gun victim” from the Valley. However, it turned out that the girl in the photograph was an injured girl from Gaza, not a “victim from Kashmir”.

In her response to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Saturday, Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, said India had deliberately skirted the “core issue” of Kashmir at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA).

Exercising her “right to reply”, Lodhi waved a photograph of a girl with multiple injuries on the face and said, “This is the face of Indian democracy.” But the alleged “pellet gun victim” turned out to be a Rawya abu Jom’a, a 17-year-old from Gaza who suffered shrapnel injuries during an Israeli airstrike. The photograph was clicked by Heidi Levine, an award-winning photojournalist based in Jerusalem, in July 2014, while covering the Gaza war for The National, and was published as a collection by The Guardian in 2014.

Jom’a was one of the many youths injured by shrapnel during an airstrike by Israeli forces. The photograph was also tweeted on March 27, 2015, by Dr Ramy Abdu, whose bio on his verified Twitter account says he is the founder of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

Lodhi, in her reply to Swaraj’s speech, described India as the “mother of terrorism” in South Asia, and accused it of sponsoring terrorism in various parts of Pakistan. On Saturday, Swaraj had attacked Pakistan, saying that while India created IITs, IIMs and AIIMS, Pakistan had produced Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Haqqani Network and Hizbul Mujahideen.

Usually, a junior diplomat is fielded to counter the allegations by Prime Ministers or External Affairs Ministers from India or Pakistan. For instance, Eenam Gambhir, a 2005-batch Indian diplomat, responded to Pakistan Prime Minister Shaid Khaqan Abbasi’s speech. However, since Pakistan fielded its top diplomat at the UN, the blooper did not go unnoticed. Swaraj retweeted a media report about Lodhi waving the wrong photograph.