The Guardian : Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake

Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake
Image of bloodied man picked up by British newspapers has been circulating 
online for two years
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	* Amelia Hill 
	* guardian.co.uk, Monday 2 May 2011 12.03 BST  
	* Article history
 
An image purporting to show Osama bin  Laden's bloody corpse, right, is a 
composite of two separate images,  left and centre. Photograph: twitpic
An image apparently showing a dead Osama bin Laden broadcast on Pakistani 
television and picked up by British newspaper websites is a fake.
The  bloodied image of a man with matted hair and a blank, half-opened eye  has 
been circulating on the internet for the past two years. It was used  on the 
front pages of the Mail, Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror  websites, though 
swiftly removed after the fake was exposed on Twitter.
It appears  the fake picture was initially published by the Middle East online 
newspaper themedialine.org on 29 April 2009, with a warning from the editor that 
it was "unable to ascertain whether the photo is genuine or not". The Daily Mail 
was one of the newspaper websites to publish the fake picture of Osama bin 
Laden's body.   

Since then, however, the image has been claimed as genuine on a  number of 
conspiracy forums and used to substantiate claims that the  terrorist 
responsible for the 9/11 bombings had been killed.
The  Guardian was one of the few sites to hold  back from using the  manipulated 
image on its front page, reporting the picture's existence  in its live blog but 
questioning its legitimacy.
The image is based on a genuine photograph of Bin Laden taken in 1998 and used 
by the Reuters news agency.
On Twitter, a composite including the other photograph used to make the image 
was posted by @HannahMarbina and other users showed how easy it was to find the 
image already online with a simple search.