Related to the “Wounded Boy In Orange Seat” stunt here is a little item that only increases my distrust of the truthfulness of the whole tale.
On Friday August 19 Middle East Correspondent Raf Sanchez and Said Ghazali of the BritishTelegraph reported of an interview with the father of the allegedly wounded boy in the orange seat:
Abu Ali, the father of the child whose haunted face now peers out from newspaper pages across the world, described his family’s final night of normalcy in an interview with a Syrian activist on behalf of The Telegraph.
…
Contrary to the reports of the Aleppo doctors who treated Omran, the little boy is only three years old and not five. Omran has been released from the hospital along with his four siblings and all the children are quietly recovering, his father said.
Confirming the above the Syria Campaign, a part of the mostly U.S. financed anti-Syrian propaganda apparatus, had published this on August 18:
Thank god all Omran’s family are safe. His mother had some bad injuries in her legs. His father suffered a minor head injury. His 7 year old sister went through a surgical operation this afternoon and she is doing well.
Note that there is no mentioning of an injured boy.
On Saturday The Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent Raf Sanchez reported a quite different story than the one he himself had told just a day earlier:
It emerged Saturday that Omran Daqneesh’s older brother Ali had succumbed to injuries suffered in the same airstrike that propelled his sibling onto television screens across the planet.Ali, 10, was out on the street when a Russian or Syrian regime bomb fell on his family’s building in Aleppo’s Qaterji neighbourhood on Wednesday.
While the rest of his family suffered minor injuries as their flat collapsed around them, Ali appears to have been more fully exposed to the bomb blast and died in hospital.
…
Omran’s father, who asked to be identified only by the nickname Abu Ali, meaning “father of Ali”, received mourners at the family’s temporary home on Saturday. Omran, three, and his three surviving siblings stayed inside the house as Abu Ali accepted condolences on the street.
The BBC noted:
The elder brother of Omran Daqneesh, the Syrian boy whose dazed and bloodied image shocked the world, has died of wounds sustained when the family home in Aleppo was bombed, activists say.The Syria Solidarity Campaign said 10-year-old Ali “passed away today due to his injuries from the bombing of his house by Russia/Assad”.
The second Telegraph piece is accompanied by the picture of a boy with what looks like a minor bloody (but completely uncleaned and not disinfected(!)) scratch on the upper left cheek. The eyes are closed and two tubes hang loosely from his mouth. A cardiogram sensor is fixed on the chest below his shoulder. The caption to that pic says “Ali (left) was killed in the blast …”. Is he really dead?
One day we learn from the father and others, that:
- all children, including Ali, are fine
- all are recovering
- all had left the hospital
The next day we learn that:
- Ali was severely injured
- Ali died of these injuries
- in a hospital (which ignores basic trauma care) that he apparently never left.
The Telegraph’s stenographer, who wrote both stories, ignores these large contradictions between the two tales.
I for one believe that both stories are false and that the whole bombing and rescue incident never really happened but was staged. The “rescue” was a stunt and all stories around it, like the “dead Ali”, are mere fairy-tales of various “activists” paid by this or that “western” propaganda campaign.
There was a time when newspapers like The Telegraph and other media employed journalists who followed up on stories and verified the claims made to them. For many media outlets that is obviously no longer the case. Today any “activist” can skype the stenographer from anywhere, tell a fantasy story of a bombing in east-Aleppo and have it printed. A day later he can call again with a totally different version of that fantasy story and have that printed too. No questions asked.
Is it any wonder that readers and viewers shun such media?
