A photograph showing a large crowd of refugees supposedly walking towards France has been shared over 2,000 times this weekend from the Facebook page “SOS anti-white-racism“. According to this page, the image depicts thousands of refugees attempting to cross the Franco-Italian border on the 17th of March, near the commune of Menton in southern France. In reality, the photograph dates back to the 18th September 2015, and was taken near the city of Edirne in Turkey by a photographer from the Reuters news agency.

At the time the image was shot, the migration crisis was at its peak with thousands of refugees travelling from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries to Europe. Some reporters followed their journey, including Osman Orsal, a photographer with Reuters, who took this picture.  A closer investigation of the image clearly shows that the group is walking along the the Turkish O-3 highway that links Istanbul with Edirne, close to the Greek and Bulgarian borders. On the road sign we can identify directions to the “Otogar” in Edirne. A quick online translation tell us the word Otogar in Turkish translates to English as “bus station”.

Several representatives of France’s National Front party accuse television channel C8 of having manipulated a report in order to discredit them by including testimony of a fake party-sympathiser making homophobic and racist comments. They say that Kevin, the party-sympathiser, is actually a “sound engineer at Canal+”, a channel that belongs to the same group as C8, and published a screenshot of his Facebook page where he presents himself as such. However, C8 and Kevin’s father deny these allegations and this screenshot was most likely fabricated.

(Translation: ‘The infamous racist militant and homophobe from the documentary on @C8TV is in fact a sound engineer for Canal+! Lagache is a scoundrel!’)

One of the National Front’s vice-presidents, Steeve Briois, admonished the C8 channel on Twitter, in a message that was retweeted hundreds of times. Marine Le Pen told AFP: “This is the type of manoeuvre that is used by the media. It’s shameful and I hope that they’ll be severely reprehended.”

C8 rejected the allegations in a press release published on social media. C8 said it saved the Facebook profile of the witness in question “just after the filming”, and that there was no mention of a “job or employer”. No modifications have been detected since and it appears that the screenshot was probably fabricated.

In the press release C8 also said that TVPresse Productions, the production company behind the report, “has, in their rushes, a non-tampered sequence in which an executive of the FNJ (organisation of Le Pen youth supporters) from Nice says that it was another executive who sent and recommended this person for interview.

Journalists from French newspaper Libération who had access to these images have confirmed the statement. They also contacted the person who published the Facebook screenshot, Cyril Martinez, the deputy FNJ departmental Secretary in the Alpes-Maritimes, who admitted not having verified the image’s authenticity.

When contacted by Buzzfeed, Kevin’s father denied that his son worked at Canal+, adding that “Kevin is known as being handicapped.. He was searching for his political identity and had been with the Republicans. Now he wanted to try out the National Front.”