Morgue pictures don’t show hidden bodies of Valencia flood victims

Misinformation about the devastating floods in Valencia continues to spread online, more than two months after the disaster hit the Spanish city.

These pictures for example are being shared on X, supposedly showing the bodies of some of those killed in the floods.

You can see body bags stored in what appear to be morgues, and the pictures are often shared with other images which are more readily identifiable as being from Valencia.

The caption of this post says that journalists are hiding the photos of the victims of what it calls a “genocidal tsunami”.

Instead, the media does show the bodies of immigrants arriving in Spain by boat, according to the post.

In fact, this particular account has posted several times, seemingly in an effort to create a conspiracy narrative that there are many more fatalities from the Valencia floods which the authorities are trying to hide.

The photos however have nothing to do with the Valencia floods or Spain in general.

A reverse image search of one of the pictures directs to an eight-year-old article about a street race court case in Los Angeles.

The image shared on X in connection with the Valencia floods is actually a cropped version of the headline image here.

The article, published in April 2016, says nothing about any natural disasters in Spain.

Instead, it explains that a court ordered a 19-year-old to spend time in a Los Angeles morgue to see what happens to those who engage in reckless driving, after he was found guilty of taking part in a street race that killed two people.

A reverse image search of the other picture tells a similar story.

This one leads to an article published in September 2016, which also deals with a group sentenced to tour a morgue, this time in San Diego.

The sentences were handed down to educate at-risk youths and adult criminals on the potential consequences of their actions.

Ultimately, the case of these falsely attributed images suggests that there isn’t, in fact, any conspiracy to hide the bodies of those who died in the Valencia floods.

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Furthermore, the Spanish government keeps and regularly updates statistics on its website that show the number of fatalities and disappearances, in addition to the resources allocated to the ongoing relief efforts.

The internet continues to be rife with misinformation regarding the floods. EuroVerify has already looked into claims that the extreme weather was artificially engineered, and into differing death counts and allegations that the government tried to distract from the floods by engineering a fake helicopter crash, among others.