Young Thief in Iran Punished by Running a Truck Over His Arm?-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A sequence of pictures of a truck running over the arm of a young boy. The text says he was a starving Iranian child who had stolen some bread from the marketplace and this was his punishment.
The Truth:
This eRumor has circulated as having happened in various Moslem countries, but came from an Iranian website.
We checked with Iranian sources who said this was more likely a street performance than an act of Islamic punishment. The man in the picture is holding a microphone and as gruesome as the pictures appear, the boy is not harmed, but is part of the act. People gather around and pay money for the performance and the boy walks away. Our Iranian source also says that if this had actually be a public act of punishment, it would have been carried out by a uniformed officer.