Veerender Jubbal’s real image that was photoshopped and shared on social media, blaming him as a Paris attacker. (Source: Veerender Jubbal Twitter) Veerender Jubbal’s real image that was photoshopped and shared on social media, blaming him as a Paris attacker. (Source: Veerender Jubbal Twitter)

A Sikh man named Veerender Jubbal was falsely framed as one of the Paris attackers after a photoshopped image of him went viral on social media. Shockingly the image was also used by a Spanish newspaper La Razon on the front page and named Jubbal as a terrorist.

A picture of Jubbal holding an iPad was photoshopped where the iPad was replaced with a Quran and a suicide vest was also added. One of the first tweets was put out by an handle named @abualut8 which shared the image and the caption, “BREAKING, one Islamic State attacker in #ParisAttacks was a Sikh convert to Islam.”

The tweet has since then been deleted, but not before causing some serious damage to Jubbal’s reputation given that media in various parts of Europe already labelled him a terrorist.

Jubbal has since had to explain on Twitter that he’s a Sikh, not a Muslim and has never even traveled to Paris and has nothing to do with the attacks.

Jubbal wrote on Twitter in a series of tweets, “Never been to Paris. Am a Sikh dude with a turban. Lives in Canada. This whole thing puts me in a bad position in the sense, where I could be harmed and/or hurt due to this. This is libel from news, and TV. In gauging this entire incident–millions upon millions of people have seen the photoshopped images, and have placed me as a terrorist.” Check out his Twitter timeline here.

You can all check the last retweets. Let us start with basics. Never been to Paris. Am a Sikh dude with a turban. Lives in Canada. — Veerender Jubbal (@Veeren_Jubbal) November 14, 2015

Has spread to the point, where many people have had to tweet about the photos being photoshopped.. Any support/nice messages are welcome. — Veerender Jubbal (@Veeren_Jubbal) November 14, 2015

I hope everyone has caught up with what is going on with me. I went viral due to a photoshopped image claiming I am a terrorist. — Veerender Jubbal (@Veeren_Jubbal) November 15, 2015

This is not the first time that social media has been used to wrongly frame someone for a terror attack in the West. In the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, a Reddit thread had wrongly declared a missing Indian student named Sunil Tripathi as one of the suspected bombers.

On Reddit and social media, Tripathi was declared a suspect, adding to the anguish of his parents who had been searching for their missing son for nearly a month. All of this was based on unverified sources, and proved to be incorrect in the end.

Just as in 2013, folks on social media and even mainstream media remain clueless when it comes to verifying so called sources on Twitter or other such sites. As Jubbal rightly points out the fake image being shared is not just libel, but also puts his life in the way of possible harm or hate attacks.

Portraying @Veeren_Jubbal as a terrorist puts his life at risk, ruins his reputation. This is online terrorism. pic.twitter.com/U5bJYCnIsC — Amy (@AmyStephen) November 15, 2015

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