Facebook posts which have been shared tens of thousands of times claim that Pakistan’s second tallest man has died. The claim is false — AFP spoke to Naseer Soomro by phone in June, 2019.
“I am alive and speaking to you and I don’t understand what people get from spreading such false news,” he said.
Three photos — two of which show Soomro, and one which shows a very tall object wrapped in white — were published in this Facebook post on May 17, which was shared 38,000 times before it was removed.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:
The post’s Urdu language caption translates to English as: “A very tall man of the world has passed away, pray for him, he was a Muslim.”
Soomro is seven foot nine inches according to this report published by Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper on December 20, 2018.
Zia Rashid, a 23-year-old from Mutlan, is now Pakistan’s tallest man at eight foot, according to this January 11, 2019 Associated Press report.
The top image in the misleading posts shows a group of men transporting a long object wrapped in a white cloth:
A red and white Indonesian flag can be seen in the upper left hand corner of the image, which has circulated online in Indonesian-language social media posts since at least 2018, for example here
Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), where Soomro works in the Customer Services department, also told AFP by phone on June 19, 2019, that Soomro was alive.
“Mr Soomro is alive and his is still an employee of PIA,” airline spokesman Mashhood Tajwar told AFP.
