On March 4, a photograph showing Sakhalin Governor Alexander Khoroshavin handcuffed to his seat aboard an airplane appeared in news agency RIA Novosti’s photo archive. Khoroshavin was arrested on March 4 on bribery charges, but the image, it turns out, is fake. An anonymous Twitter account RIP Novosti, a satirical microblog that, as its name indicates, often lampoons RIA Novosti, revealed the forgery.
The original photograph, published in 2013 on the Kazakh photo-journalism website Vox Populi in a story about airline food, shows a man named Adil sitting in the business class section of an airplane.
The photograph on RIA Novosti’s website is identical to the Vox Populi image, except for the head and the handcuffs on the man’s wrist. The Vox Populi logo is also removed from the image on RIA Novosti bearing Khoroshavin’s head.
RIA Novosti soon deleted the photograph from its database. A spokesperson for the news agency’s holding company told Meduza the image was published by mistake, saying “The photo uploaded to the archive by mistake has been deleted, as it was never authenticated. We apologize to our subscribers.”