Is Saudi Arabia about to behead six schoolgirls for acting indecently with male friends? No, that's not true: the story recently went viral again via the newest site in a network of Macedonian fake news websites that keeps recycling the same old stories over and over again. It was proven false over a year ago already, it is not real.
The story reappared as an article published by TVRTINFO.COM on December 10, 2018 titled "Saudi Arabia Is About To Behead 6 School Girls For Acting Indecently With Their Male Friends - tvrtinfo.com" (archived here) which opened:
Western countries are being urged to intervene in a case where 6 young school girls facing execution for acting indecently at a friends house.
Fathima Al Kwaini and her friends that included three male friends have celebrated Kwaini's birthday at a friends house. A neighbor supposedly an assistant of an Imam of a mosque close by has reported this to Saudi Arabia's religious police. When the police arrived the girls were dancing with their male friends and they were arrested immediately.
The ultra conservative Arabian nation that has one of the worst human rights records is also a member of the United Nations Human Rights commission and recently got elected to the Women's Rights Commission as well which sparked anger and protest. According to HRW the girls were detained for more than a year before the trial and never confessed committing any crime. However the verdict of the "male only" Sharia panel was that they need o be executed in accordance with the Sharia law. The boys were only advised "not to be victimized" the report further states.
The story originally came from a site named religionmind.com:
Saudi Arabia to Behead 6 School Girls for Being With Their Male Frien...
on Monday, 23 October 2017 Labels: Islam Western countries are being urged to intervene in a case where 6 young school girls facing execution for acting indecently at a friends house. Fathima Al Kwaini and her friends that included three male friends have celebrated Kwaini's birthday at a friends house.
PolitiFact already looked into it in 2017 and found it was not true:
Fake news: girls in Saudi Arabia face beheading
Don't listen to the fake news that a group of girls in Saudi Arabia will be killed for dancing at a birthday party. "Saudi Arabia to Behead 6 School Girls for Being With Their Male Friends Without Parents or a Guardian," stated the headline on religionmind.com on Oct. 23.
The site now republishing the hoax is part of a larger network of fake news sites centered in Macedonia that we recently wrote about:
Old Network of Anti-Islam Fake News Websites Turns To Twitter Trolling | Lead Stories
Tara, Jesica, Ana, Lora: since a few weeks dozens of trolls on Twitter are dangling bait in front of American Trump supporters. Their goal: bring in as many clicks as possible for two commercial, (potentially Serbian) anti-islam websites. And it is working: in twelve days they reached a potential audience on Facebook of 3.8 milion users.
NewsGuard, a company that uses trained journalist to rank the reliability of websites, describes tvrtinfo.com as:
One of more than forty sites in a network, all registered in Macedonia, that publish false and plagiarized stories, primarily promoting anti-Muslim and pro-Trump narratives.
According to NewsGuard the site does not maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Read their full assessment here.
We wrote about tvrtinfo.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
