Dead Iranian president appears in viral fake 'BRICS selfie'

A purported selfie of several world leaders at the 2026 BRICS Summit in New Delhi has gone viral on social media — and was even shared by the official X accounts of the Russian Embassy in India and the Embassy of Iran in India.

The image appears to show Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi posing together.

There is, however, one rather significant problem with the picture: Raisi died in a helicopter crash on 19 May 2024.

That makes his appearance at a summit held on 12–13 September 2026 difficult to explain — unless BRICS has quietly added resurrection to its cooperation agenda.

At least two BJP leaders — Shazia Ilmi and Manoj Tiwari — shared the selfsame image, and at least one of them — Ilmi — deleted the post after being called out.

The image is false. Iran’s delegation to the summit was led by President Masoud Pezeshkian, while Lula did not attend the summit in person. The UAE’s representation also did not match the person identified in the viral caption.

The image’s circulation is particularly notable because it was not confined to anonymous social-media users. It was also amplified by the X accounts of the Russian Embassy in India and the Embassy of Iran in India.

The posts raise an obvious question: how did an image featuring a president who died more than two years ago make its way into the social-media feeds of two diplomatic missions?

The image may have been AI-generated or digitally manipulated, though that would require a separate image-forensics assessment. What can be established immediately is that the claim accompanying it is false.

Authentic photographs and videos from the summit show PM Modi meeting Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pezeshkian and other leaders. They do not support the claim that the group shown in the viral image posed for a selfie at Bharat Mandapam.

In the age of AI-generated imagery, apparently even a deceased president can make it to a summit — and, more surprisingly, past the social-media desks of two embassies.