Claim: Photographs show a boy having his arm crushed under a truck as a punishment for stealing bread.
Examples:[Collected via e-mail, 2005]
An 8 year old child caught stealing bread in a market of Iran is punished in a public place, in the name of Islam!!!
His arm will be crushed and will lose its use permanently. A religion of peace and love, they say? How can anyone believe them
when they commit such inhuman acts?
Dear Friends,
My first reaction to these pictures was "I don´t believe this, it must be a photographic trick".
Unfortunately, the truth seems evident, a little boy gets punished because he has stolen bread and they drive a heavy vehicle over his arm ....
What do you do when you receive a series of pictures like this? You ignore them???? Delete and think, thank God I am not living in Iran? This does not happen in my world ....
But the world is OURS - whether we live in Portugal, Sweden or in Iran. OUR children grow up in this world.
I feel helpless but I don´t want to think I received these pictures for no reason. Therefore, let´s use the power of the computer and internet to spread the information around the world. Maybe it can save some children from abuse in the future ...???
Ignorance can be defeated .... And the internet is a wonderful weapon.
Origins: The above-displayed photographs have been circulating on the Internet since at least 2004, usually in e-mail forwards that set them in one of several Arab/Muslim areas (e.g., Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Palestinian territories) and claim that the boy pictured is being punished under a harsh sharia law system that imposes a penalty grossly out of proportion to the nature of the crime (i.e., having his arm crushed under a vehicle because he stole a loaf of
bread).
What the photographs actually depict (according to the operator of the site that originally published them) is performers hustling money from onlookers by staging an act, one in which a subject seemingly allows himself to be run over by a heavy vehicle and then emerges unscathed. (Note the man with the microphone in the first picture, who drums up business and describes the action for observers. Also note the blanket placed under the boy's arm — not a consideration persons intent on severely punishing a lawbreaker would be likely to provide.) This a common illusion, variations of which are performed by many magicians and accomplished through a variety of means, with no lasting harm done. That the subject is a small boy who grimaces his way through the stunt is all part of the act, intended to elicit sympathy and extra cash — despite his contorted facial expressions, the boy is not seriously hurt.
The versions of these photographs circulated via e-mail generally leave out the last pictures of the original series, which show the same boy after the conclusion of the stunt:
Last updated: 1 March 2006
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/photos/gruesome/crushboy.asp
