North Korea has been caught doctoring a photograph to double the number of hovercraft in a military exercise as part of its increasingly aggressive propaganda campaign.
The suspect photograph showing landing craft and soldiers taking part in military exercises somewhere in North Korea Photo: AFP/GETTY
The picture showed vessels with the same give-away shine on the front, moving
through the water at an identical angle and throwing up spray that had been
clumsily altered.
News agencies, which had picked up the image from North
Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), eventually killed the
distribution of the photograph with Agence France-Presse stating “excessive
digital alteration” had taken place.
Eric Baradat, the AFP photo editor, said “various anomalies” were apparent
even though the North Koreans were becoming more sophisticated in their
fakery. “Usually a very simple examination with our software dismisses KCNA
pictures but they tend to be better with Photoshop recently,” he said.
KCNA has been at the forefront of Pyongyang’s ferocious blitz of threats, the
latest of which came on Wednesday when the regime of Kim Jong-un warned that
the conditions for nuclear war existed on the peninsula.
