Fact-Check: Is Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar dead?

For the last 2-3 days the news of Taliban’s new Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar went viral particularly in India and Pakistan. According to a hoard of handles, Baradar was allegedly killed either by COVID-19 or in a bomb attack on Monday.

The news was spread massively in Indian and Pakistani circles. An image of Baradar with the headline and Al-Jazeera’s logo was also circulated along with this claim .

Similar claim was posted by hundred of handles

Fact-Check :

Upon trying to look for this claim on Al Jazeera’s website, we could not find any such news there.

This claim was then addressed by the Taliban themselves when they themselves issued a statement that this is false news. Mullah Baradar himself released a statement calling this claim false.

Therefore, this claim is fake.

DFRAC Editor

Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) is a non-partisan and independent media organisation which focuses on fact-checking and identifying hate speech. With the popularisation of the internet came the challenge of information overload and often times, our feeds are overpopulated with conflicting, incendiary and false information which is increasingly becoming difficult to ignore and not believe in

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