Photo of Syrian boy harmed in airstrike ‘manipulated’: Assad

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday claimed the viral photo of a Syrian boy, Omran Daqneesh, harmed in an airstrike was ‘manipulated’.

Assad’s comments came during an interview with Swiss media. The Swiss broadcaster showed Assad a picture of the five-year-old boy whose photo went viral as a symbol of human suffering in Syria, and asked him if he had seen it before. ‘His name is Omran, five years old, covered in blood, scared, traumatised, is there anything you’d like to say to Omran and his family?,’ asked the interviewer.

‘I have something to say to you first of all, go to the internet to see the same picture with the same child with his sister,’ said Assad.

He said that both children were rescued by the ‘White Helmets,’ Syrian volunteers who work to search for survivors following airstrikes. But Assad said these volunteers are ‘a facelift of al Nusra.’

Assad claims that the White Helmets rescued the children twice as part of a publicity campaign.’

It is manipulated,’ Assad said of the photo. ‘This is a forged picture, not a real one,’ he added.

But hours earlier, in another interview, Assad’s wife paid tribute to Omran and other child victims of the Syrian war.

Moreover, the photo is only a still from a longer video footage shot by the Aleppo Media Center, which shows rescuers pulling Omran from the rubble of a house and sitting him in the back of an ambulance.

While the little boy makes no sound he eventually raises a small hand to his injuries.

In interviews, Assad consistently sticks to his talking points and the same narrative he has held since the beginning of the war in Syria.

In an earlier interview with the Associated Press, Assad claimed he was virtually blameless for six years of death and devastation in Syria that started when he used excessive violent force against his own people to crush largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations.

This article originally appeared on Business Insider.