Haters will say it’s fake

Russia’s Investigative Committee deletes group picture with investigator following photoshop accusations

On June 9, the Belgorod region’s Investigative Committee department deleted a picture from their website, which was taken during a meeting between the Alekseevsky district’s head investigator, Alexander Sidenko, and a group of emergency services workers. In the picture, Sidenko can be seen wearing a black mask. The only problem is that the mask was photoshopped into the picture, or so the Telegram channel “Belgorod No.1” claims.

“Judging by checking the photograph’s EXIF [data], it was edited in the app ‘YouCam Makeup’,” the Telegram channel explains.

Twitter users responded to the news with jokes and their own doctored versions of the photograph:

According to Baza, Sidenko personally confirmed that he was actually wearing a mask during the meeting. The Belgorod Investigative Committee also denied that it was photoshop. That said, the picture was taken off their site a day later (it is, however, still saved to the website’s cache).

“We deleted these photographs in order to avoid further negativity and verify how things really were,” the Belgorod Investigative Committee department commented, promising to find out what actually happened.