By Hazel Gandhi
A morphed tweet attributed to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif claims that he congratulated the Indian National Congress after they won the recent Karnataka elections. BOOM found that the tweet is fake and Sharif made no such comment.
On Saturday, May 13, INC won 135 seats in Karnataka and formed a majority in the state, defeating the BJP who could only capture 66 seats in the election.
Amid this, a fake tweet purporting to show that Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif congratulated Congress and expressed hope to strengthen Islam in the state has been going viral.
The tweet reads, "I would like to heartily thank the people of Karnataka for electing Congress, I hope that Congress along with our SDPI (Sustainable Development Policy Institute) will work for the strengthening of Islam in India and the sovereignty of Karnataka!"
The tweet, dated May 13, is being shared in Urdu along with an English translation with the caption, "Pakistani Prime minister congratulating people of Karnataka for electing Congress."
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
Click here to view the tweet and here for an archive.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the tweet is fake, and Shehbaz Sharif has not publicly congratulated Congress for their Karnataka win.
We went through Shehbaz Sharif's Twitter profile and found only three tweets from May 13, none of which were regarding the Karnataka elections.
Further, we also looked at an archive of his profile made on May 14, which also did not show any tweet similar to the one in the viral claim.
Click here to view.
By using TruthNest, a social media analytics tool for Twitter, we were able to confirm that only three tweets were made from Sharif's account on May 13.
By using Twitter's advanced search&src=typed_query&f=top), we looked for replies to any deleted tweets and did not find any results\.
Finally, we also looked for Indian and Pakistani news reports about Sharif congratulating Congress, and found no such articles.
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