At the beginning of July 2024, Telegram channels reported that unknown persons, having broken a window, threw a pig’s head wrapped in a Palestinian flag with the inscription “Ukraine supports Israel” into one of the mosques in the German capital. We checked whether such publications are true.
The first posts about the desecration of a Muslim temple in Berlin appeared in Russian-language Telegram channels on July 4, 2024. According to the TGStat service, within two days they received a total of 2.7 million views. As reported in publications, on the morning of July 4, the ministers of the Ahmadiyya mosque (many bloggers used the German-language name Berliner Moschee) allegedly found a pig's head lying on the floor, thrown through a broken window and wrapped in a Palestinian flag, on which was written in German “Ukraine supports Israel.” “Ukrainians planted a pig's head in Germany's oldest mosque,” read the headlines of many posts. The publications were accompanied by photographs from several angles, and the text itself contained statistics on acts of vandalism in European mosques and spoke about the “aggressive” behavior of Ukrainians towards EU residents. Similar posts appeared in the channels “Sanya in Florida"(440,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Newsach / Dvach"(193,000), "Observer"(187,000), "Putin on Telegram"(180,000), etc. They also wrote about the incident Media, bloggers, users "Zena", "VKontakte" And Facebook.
The viral posts use, in whole or in part, a set of four photographs: the exterior of the mosque, its interior, and two different photographs of a pig's head wrapped in a Palestinian flag with the inscription "Ukraine steht für Israel." In the first of four pictures there really is captured Ahmadiyya Mosque (aka Berlin Mosque, or Wilmersdorf Mosque) in the southwest of Berlin, and on the second - its interior decoration (the same carpet pattern is visible in broadcasts, available on the temple’s YouTube channel). At least, a very similar covering is visible in the photographs with the pig's head, but there are no other details in the images confirming that the photographs were taken specifically in the Ahmadiyya mosque.
"Verified" studied Berlin police website, where daily incident reports are published, including cases vandalism And desecration religious sites. IN archive for July there is no mention of the pig's head incident that allegedly took place at the Ahmadiyya Mosque. Moreover, how claim fact checkers for the dpa news agency, police had not heard anything about the alleged incident until they received a request for comment. “Based on the information available to the Berlin police, the messages you are interested in are false,” a department representative responded to a dpa request on July 9, five days after the act of vandalism, which was reported on Telegram channels. Imam of the mosque Amir Aziz in conversation with fact checkers confirmedthat there was no such incident in the temple. Received similar comments Correctiv, T-Online And ZDF.
German journalists note that the phrase “Ukraine steht für Israel”, which is written on the Palestinian flag from viral photographs, is formulated strangely - as if someone literally translated the phrase Ukraine stands for Israel (“Ukraine supports Israel”) from English. Similar phrases exist in German, but are slightly different. Thus, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in his speech shortly after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine spoke: "Wir stehen ein für den Frieden in Europa" (“We support peace in Europe”).
Telegram channels that talked about a pig's head wrapped in a Palestinian flag referred to the publication of the Berliner-Wochenzeitung. On his website there is a note about the desecration of a Berlin mosque appeared July 4th, it coincides almost word for word with the content of the viral posts. “Verified” was unable to find any other German media that reported an attack on a Muslim temple in the country’s capital.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
At the time of writing this analysis, the Berliner-Wochenzeitung website not updated It’s been a week and a half now - the latest news appeared there on July 5th. At the same time, according to the Who.is service, the domain berliner-wochenzeitung.de was registered June 18, 2024, which is about two weeks before the publication about the pig's head. IN first day existence of the site there was not a single news, and on the main page only a post template with the title “Hello, world!” was displayed.
This is not the first time that fake news has been spread through fake news sites, which are often created solely for the purpose of disinformation. Previously "Verified" sorted it out a similar fake published by the fake French publication Vérité Сachée - the publication claimed that the first lady of Ukraine Elena Zelenskaya allegedly bought a car in Paris for €4.5 million. Other examples of similar sites that masquerade as news publications in order to spread misinformation are Flagstaff Post, who wrote about the wiretapping of Donald Trump, London Crier, who claimed that Vladimir Zelensky bought a mansion from King Charles III, and DC Weekly, according to which the President of Ukraine spent the funds that America gave the country as financial assistance to purchase two yachts. As Verified found out, all these statements turned out to be false.
In May 2024, the NewsGuard project published its results investigations, which revealed a connection between 167 similar news sites, including DC Weekly, and former American military man John Dugan, who moved to Russia, who was also previously mentioned in debriefings "Checked."
Thus, the news about the pig's head that the Ukrainians allegedly planted in the Berlin Ahmadiyya Mosque is fake. It first appeared on a fake website pretending to be a German media outlet. Information about the desecration of the temple was denied by the Berlin police and the imam of the mosque.
Cover photo: website Berliner-Wochenzeitung
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