Image of bloodied man picked up by British newspapers has been circulating online for two years.
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".
Source and fully story: The Guardian, 2 May 2011
The composite OBL-Wa'ad Jajim Mohammed fake has been on the internet since April 2009, when they were previously trying to peddle a claim that Osama had just been killed. According to The Guardian, the Osama photo used for the beard and mouth is from 1998. Wa'ad Jajim Mohammed was an Iraqi who was 46 years old, married with three children, killed February 2006 after being arrested in Baghdad.
The funny thing is how The Guardian implies that "conspiracy theorists" were responsible for the hoax and were promoting it as real, when in fact the news outlets were broadcasting it as genuine until the fake was pointed out by the so-called "conspiracy" sites.