- Thabo Bester, killer and rapist who faked prison death, caught with celebrity doctor girlfriend year after escape New York Post
- “Facebook rapist” who escaped prison by faking death with help from guards is brought back to South Africa CBS News
- The convicted murderer suspected of faking his own death in a South African prison fire CNN
- In-depth | Bester escape reveals that we are stuck with leaders who aren’t leading – expert News24
- OPINION | Scandals surrounding Bester saga illustrate state disintegration as public left vulnerable News24
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Faked
‘You People’ Actor Claims Jonah Hill and Lauren London’s Pivotal Kiss Was Faked With CGI – Hollywood Reporter
- ‘You People’ Actor Claims Jonah Hill and Lauren London’s Pivotal Kiss Was Faked With CGI Hollywood Reporter
- Jonah Hill and Lauren London’s You People Kiss Was Faked with CGI, Costar Claims Yahoo Entertainment
- Jonah Hill And Lauren London’s ‘You People’ Kiss Was CGI, According To Costar HuffPost
- Jonah Hill and Lauren London had ‘a FAKE KISS’ created by CGI in You People says costar Daily Mail
- Was The ‘You People’ Kiss Between Jonah Hill and Lauren London Faked Using CGI? Rumors Explode After a Controversial Podcast Episode Drops Decider
- View Full Coverage on Google News
‘Sister Wives’ Robyn Brown Says Christine Faked Kody Relationship
- Robyn accused Christine of “faking” a good relationship with Kody on “Sister Wives.”
- She also said Christine and Kody “don’t communicate well at all.”
- Janelle told cameras she felt like the conversation was meant to “invalidate” Christine.
On Sunday’s episode of TLC’s “Sister Wives,” star Christine Brown told her former sister wives Robyn, Janelle, and Meri that she had a buyer for her house and was moving to Utah in a week’s time.
The news led to an intense conversation about the status of Kody’s marriages, during which Robyn Brown accused Christine of “faking” a good marriage in front of her when the family lived in Las Vegas.
After Christine said that some of the kids in the family saw that her marriage to Kody had been struggling since they lived in Las Vegas, Robyn got defensive. “In Vegas? OK, that’s a lie,” she said.
“‘Cause I remember the conversations, I remember what was going on,” Robyn added. “I remember Janelle and Kody making their relationship better than it ever had been. I remember him talking with you. I remember you guys having fun dates and hearing about that and seeing you guys’ relationship.”
“So either you guys were faking it in front of me… I don’t know,” she concluded.
TLC
In a solo interview about the exchange, Kody’s second wife Janelle Brown told cameras it was odd to watch Robyn accuse Christine of lying because she’d known the pair were having problems for a long time. She said she felt like Robyn and Kody (who was present for the conversation, which took place in Christine’s backyard) were trying to “invalidate Christine, just tell her that she’s being crazy” and leaving the family “on a whim.”
Robyn misunderstood the fact that Christine was talking about her own marriage to Kody and not claiming that all of Kody’s marriages were unhealthy in Las Vegas. Though they eventually cleared up the miscommunication, it was a rare moment of tense dialogue between the women in the Brown family, who don’t usually talk about their individual relationships with Kody to each other.
Christine and Janelle claimed Kody has favored Robyn and her kids for many years now, as chronicled on past seasons of “Sister Wives.”
On a season 16 episode, Christine told cameras that some of her daughters saw Kody had “apparent” favorite children and this made it hard for them to “respect” him.
Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
During the conversation on Sunday’s episode, when Christine started to tell Robyn that she and Kody had important conversations about how their relationship wasn’t working, Robyn remained defensive.
“You guys don’t talk though, you guys don’t communicate,” she said. “You guys don’t communicate very well at all. So I don’t really see how that could be even legitimate.”
Christine then claimed that she and Kody had communicated “better” in the last six months, which he disagreed with.
Christine and Kody split up in 2021 after over 25 years of “spiritual” marriage. This season has been chronicling the complicated nature of the split, exposing how many people are affected when a wife chooses to leave a plural family.
“Sister Wives” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
Iowa survivalist who allegedly faked his own death in 2016 to avoid child pornography charges arrested
US Marshals found and arrested 28-year-old Jacob Greer in Spanaway, Washington, on Monday. He had been on the run since 2016, authorities said.
“The arrest of Jacob Greer after six years is a testament to the tenacity of Deputy US Marshals and our investigative partners,” Ted Kamatchus, US Marshal for the Southern District of Iowa, said in the Tuesday statement.
“Even though the case went cold, they would not quit,” Kamatchus said.
Greer is currently at the Federal Detention Center in Seattle and will be transported to Des Moines to stand trial, accoring to the statement. He will be assigned counsel when he returns to Iowa, the Iowa public defender’s office said.
Greer was initially arrested in April 2016 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on charges of alleged receipt and possession of child pornography. He was released on bond the next day under pretrial supervision with an ankle monitor. He was living with his grandmother in Des Moines at the time.
On May 31, 2016, Greer’s probation officer was alerted that Greer’s ankle monitor had been removed, resulting in a multiagency search effort, the US Marshals statement said.
Authorities found Greer’s car with a suicide note inside, but searchers never found his body and a federal arrest warrant for Greer was issued. Investigators later discovered another vehicle associated with Greer at a campground in Flathead, Montana, which he had purchased with a $1,000 loan from a friend, the statement said.
The US Marshals Service said Greer was last seen at a Walmart in Kalispell, Montana, in June 2016, wearing a camouflage hat.
Greer had allegedly fled Iowa with money, a bow, arrows and a backpack full of survival gear and “had plans to live off the land in remote areas of the upper western states or southern Canada, hiding out in abandoned cabins,” the statement said.
Russia claims Bucha civilian massacre faked as a “provocation” as outrage builds over Ukraine war atrocities
Dnipro, Ukraine — Russian forces have withdrawn from around Ukraine‘s capital Kyiv, but there has been no celebration in the country. What they’ve left behind is difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to see. CBS News warns our readers that the both the video report above and the article below contain disturbing material.
Independent journalists who went into the town of Bucha, just northwest of the capital, over the weekend found the streets littered with bodies. The dead were wearing civilian clothing, and some had their hands tied behind their backs, apparently executed.
Others were buried in a mass grave. More than 300 residents were killed, according to the town’s mayor.
SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/Getty
In the central Ukrainian village of Kalynivka, closer to the southern and eastern Ukrainian cities Russia has hammered with artillery and air strikes for weeks, Irina Kostenko said the Russians killed her only son, Oleksei.
She said she brought her son’s body back home in a wheelbarrow and then buried him by herself in the garden, wrapped in a rug, in a shallow grave.
He was killed at 27, but Kostenko clung to a photo of him as a child as she stood by his grave.
“This is my love, my sweetheart,” she said.
CBS News senior foreign correspondent Holly Williams reports that Ukrainian officials shared photos taken on a highway outside the capital over the weekend showing the naked corpses of at least four women. The officials said Russian troops tried to burn the women’s bodies.
Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented cases of alleged rape by Russian troops during the invasion, which Vladimir Putin launched on February 24. Ukrainian officials are investigating.
Speaking Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of committing genocide in his country. “We are being destroyed and exterminated” he said, “and this is happening in the Europe of the 21st century.”
On Monday, Zelenskyy visited Bucha to inspect the damage and speak with residents. Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, said the president found “evidence of mass killings.”
According to Geraschchenko, a BBC correspondent asked Zelenskyy if he still believed it would be possible to negotiate for peace with Russia. The president said it would, “because Ukraine must find peace. We are in 21st century Europe. We will continue our diplomatic, and military efforts.”
RONALDO SCHEMIDT/AFP/Getty
The southeast port city of Mariupol has been besieged and bombarded by the Russians for almost 40 days, since the war started. Thousands may have been killed there alone, according to the United Nations, but it’s impossible to get an accurate picture because Mariupol has been cut off from the outside world.
Ilona, 17, and her 10-year-old brother Milan made it out of the city on Friday with their parents. CBS News found them sitting silently at an evacuation center, apparently shell-shocked.
“There were constant bombing raids, constant explosions,” Ilona told Williams. There were times they thought they would die in their city, but she said tried throughout the ordeal to “hold ourselves together — we tried not to panic.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said almost two weeks ago that the U.S. had determined that Russian forces had committed “war crimes” in Ukraine, accusing them of “indiscriminate attacks and attacks deliberately targeting civilians.”
On Sunday, he told CNN the images from Bucha were “a punch to the gut,” and he said the U.S. was “working to document” and provide its own information “to the relevant institutions and organizations that will put all of this together” to ensure any forces guilty of war crimes would he held accountable.
“We can’t normalize this,” he said. “This is the reality of what’s going on every single day, as long as Russia’s brutality against Ukraine continues. That’s why it needs to come to an end.”
On Monday, Russian officials denied civilians were killed in Bucha. The Russian defense ministry claimed the gruesome scenes in Bucha were faked by Ukrainian forces as a “provocation.” It has become a common refrain from Moscow, issued after previous alleged atrocities came to light in this war, and during Russia’s long involvement in Syria’s brutal civil war.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed the reports of what he called a “fake attack” in Bucha and said Russia was demanding “an urgent meeting of the Security Council on this particular issue because we see such provocations as a direct threat to international peace and security.”
But the United Nations human rights chief was among those voicing horror at the scenes from Bucha on Monday.
“I am horrified by the images of civilians lying dead on the streets and in improvised graves in the town of Bucha in Ukraine,” the U.N.’s Michelle Bachelet said in a statement. “Reports emerging from this and other areas raise serious and disturbing questions about possible war crimes, grave breaches of international humanitarian law and serious violations of international human rights law.”
CBS News correspondent Pamela Falk at the U.N. said U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield had discussed with Romania’s prime minister on Monday America’s intention to try to get Russia’s suspended from the U.N. Human Rights Council.
According to a readout of Thomas-Greenfield’s meeting with the Romanian leader, she said Russia’s expulsion from the rights body was needed, “in light of the mounting evidence that members of Russian forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine and following horrific reports about violence against civilians in Bucha.”
Japanese Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, standing aside his Polish counterpart during a visit to Warsaw, said he was “deeply shocked by news of the exceptionally cruel acts of violence against civilians near Kyiv.”
“The murder of innocent civilians is a violation of international humanitarian law and is unacceptable and I strongly condemn these acts,” he added. “The Russian assault is a blatant violation of international law.”
In London, the head of Britain’s equivalent of the CIA, MI6 chief Richard Moore, said in a tweet that Russia had planned mass-executions as part of its strategy in Ukraine. He shared an earlier message from the U.K. Foreign Secretary demanding that those responsible for the killings documented in Kyiv’s suburbs be held to account.
As Williams reported, the Russian soldiers accused of massacring unarmed civilians in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine will likely never be brought to justice.
ZOHRA BENSEMRA/REUTERS
But despite the horrific images and thousands of his own soldiers being killed on the battlefield, a new poll in Russia found that Putin’s approval rating had risen to 83% since the invasion began.
While thousands have been arrested for protesting against the Ukraine war in Russian cities over the last month, many Russians rely entirely on the country’s state-run news organizations for their information. Those outlets present only the Kremlin’s version of what Putin calls the “special military operation,” and no Russian media outlets are free to report the truth about what’s happening in Ukraine.
Woman faked kidnapping, defrauded California
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A Northern California woman whose disappearance and mysterious reappearance set off a frantic three-week search more than five years ago was arrested Thursday on charges of lying to federal agents about being kidnapped and defrauding the state’s victim compensation board of $30,000.
Sherri Papini, 39, of Redding, was found on Thanksgiving Day in 2016 after weeks of searching in California and several nearby states, with bindings on her body and injuries including a swollen nose and a “brand” on her right shoulder.
She had been reported missing Nov. 2. She told authorities at the time that she had been kidnapped at gunpoint by two Hispanic women, even providing descriptions to an FBI sketch artist along with extensive details of her purported abduction.
In reality, authorities said, she was staying with a former boyfriend nearly 600 miles (966 kilometers) away from her home in Orange County, in Southern California, and hurt herself to back up her false statements.
“When a young mother went missing in broad daylight, a community was filled with fear and concern,” U.S. Attorney Phillip Talbert said in a statement. “Ultimately, the investigation revealed that there was no kidnapping and that time and resources that could have been used to investigate actual crime, protect the community, and provide resources to victims were wasted.”
Papini does not yet have an attorney because she was just arrested, Talbert’s office said. Her first court appearance has not yet been set.
She was still lying about the kidnapping in August 2020 when she was interviewed by a federal agent and a Shasta County sheriff’s detective, the charges allege. They showed her evidence indicating she had not been abducted and warned her that it was a crime to lie to a federal agent.
But she still made false statements, the charges allege.
She also was reimbursed more than $30,000 by the California Victim’s Compensation Board based on the false story, the charges said. They included money for visits to her therapist for “treatment for anxiety and PTSD,” according to a court filing, and for the ambulance ride to the hospital after she surfaced near Sacramento.
She faces a mail fraud charge related to the reimbursement requests that carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison, while lying to a federal officer has a maximum five-year sentence.
“Everyone involved in this investigation had one common goal: to find the truth about what happened on Nov. 2, 2016, with Sherri Papini and who was responsible,” said Shasta County Sheriff Michael Johnson.
That 22-day search and five-year investigation not only cost money and time, he said, “but caused the general public to be fearful of their own safety, a fear that they should not have had to endure.”
Before she disappeared, Papini had gone jogging near her home about 215 miles (350 kilometers) north of San Francisco. Her husband, Keith Papini, found only her cellphone and earphones when he went searching after she failed to pick up their children at day care. She left her purse and jewelry behind.
Investigators said he passed a lie detector test. They also cleared a Detroit man they said Papini had texted and planned to meet shortly before her disappearance. He was in California at the time of her disappearance but told investigators they never met, though they had spent a weekend together in 2011.
Papini’s nose was swollen and she was wearing a chain restraint around her waist and one arm along with other bindings around her other wrist and each ankle when she was found alongside Interstate 5 nearly 150 miles from her home, according to a court filing Thursday.
She had other bruises and rashes on many parts of her body, ligature marks on her wrists and ankles, and burns on her left forearm.
Her blonde hair had been cut to shoulder length and she had a blurred “brand” burned into her right shoulder, authorities said at the time.
She had both male and female DNA on her body and clothing. The DNA eventually led to the former boyfriend in 2020, according to a court filing.
The former boyfriend told investigators that Papini stayed with him at his house during the time she was gone, and said she had asked him to come to Redding to pick her up, though he said they never had sex.
His account was verified when authorities tracked the locations of two prepaid cellphones that they had been using to secretly talk to one another as early as December 2015, according to a 55-page affidavit filed in court to support the criminal charges.
A cousin of the former boyfriend told investigators that he saw Papini in the man’s apartment twice, both times unrestrained.
About three weeks later, records backed the ex-boyfriend’s story that he rented a car and drove Papini back to Northern California.
A GoFundMe campaign raised more than $49,000 to help the family, which the couple used to pay off bills and for other expenses, according to the court filing.
At the time, she was a stay-at-home mom and her husband worked at Best Buy. There was never a ransom demand, and the family wasn’t wealthy, officials said at the time.
In retrospect, “we are relieved that the community is not endangered by unknown, violent kidnappers,” said Sean Ragan, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office.
Trial set to start on charges that actor faked racist attack
He was charged with felony disorderly conduct after law enforcement and prosecutors said he lied to police about what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 29, 2019, in downtown Chicago. He has pleaded not guilty. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday. Disorderly conduct, a class 4 felony, carries a sentence of up to three years in prison but experts have said it is more likely that if Smollett is convicted he would be placed on probation and perhaps ordered to perform community service.
Smollett told police he was walking home from a Subway sandwich shop at 2 a.m. when two men he said recognized him from the TV show “Empire” began hurling racial and homophobic slurs at him. He said the men struck him, looped a makeshift noose around his neck and shouted, “This is MAGA country,” a reference to then-President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
Reaction to his reported assault underscored the increasingly polarized political landscape; Democratic politicians and others called it a shocking example of Trump-era bigotry and hate, while Republicans accused liberals of rushing to paint the president’s supporters as racists.
Just weeks later came the stunning announcement that Smollett was charged with staging the attack to further his career and secure a higher salary. And, police said, he hired two brothers from Nigeria, to pretend to attack him for $3,500.
This made the spotlight on Smollett shine even brighter, but this time he was vilified as someone willing to use one of the most potent symbol of racism in the U.S. to further his career.
“The most vile and despicable part of it, if it’s true, is the noose,” Judge John Fitzgerald Lyke Jr., who is Black, said during Smollett’s first court appearance. “That symbol conjures up such evil in this country’s history.”
Smollett also became a national punch line. He was the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” skit and a host of Black celebrities, from NBA analyst Charles Barkley to comedian Dave Chappelle, took turns poking fun at him.
Then came the anger that Smollett’s fame accorded him influence that is out of reach for most. Reports indicated Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, at the request of former first lady Michelle Obama’s onetime chief of staff, communicated with a member of Smollett’s family early in the investigation. Foxx recused herself from the case then her office suddenly dropped the charges, and Foxx found herself at the center of a media firestorm as she refuted the suggestion that her office gave the television star a break.
All that set the stage for what turned a simple question of Smollett’s innocence or guilt into a convoluted legal saga that has dragged on for nearly three years.
Trial was delayed in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought cases around the country to a halt for months. But also, charges were filed, dropped and filed again by a special prosecutor who was brought in to take over the case.
Smollett — whose career has since faded — will this week return to the glare of the media spotlight, but this time as he passes the forest of news cameras as he makes his way to and from court.
The producers of “Empire,” on which he starred for four years, renewed his contract for the sixth and final season in 2019, but he never appeared in an episode. Nor has he released any music or given significant musical performances.
He has, however, directed an independent film, funded by his own production company, that is premiering at the American Black Film Festival this month. The movie, “B-Boy Blues” is an adaptation of a 1994 novel, the first in a series, about the lives of gay Black men in New York.
But once in court, what will unfold will be what may sound like a bad movie for the simple reason that a short movie is exactly what authorities have long maintained Smollett was trying to create.
Key witnesses will be the brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, who say Smollett wrote them a check to stage the attack. They are expected to characterize Smollett as the star and director of an “attack” in full view of a surveillance camera that he mistakenly believed would record the whole event.
And, according to their lawyer, the brothers will also describe how Smollett drove them to the spot where the incident was to play out for a “dress rehearsal.”
“He was telling them ‘Here’s a camera, there’s a camera and here’s where you are going to run away,’” said their lawyer, Gloria Rodriguez.
Israel to prosecute Hasidic pilgrims who faked negative Covid tests to fly home | Israel
Israel says it will prosecute dozens of pilgrims returning from Ukraine who flew back into the country with fake negative Covid test results.
The pilgrims had been attending the annual celebration of the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah, in the Ukrainian city of Uman, where Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who founded the Hasidic Breslov sect in the early 19th century, is buried. He was a great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism.
Between 25,000 and 30,000 pilgrims, largely from the Breslov sect, visited Uman in central Ukraine this year. Israel’s Magen David Adom medical service told the Jerusalem Post that up to 14% of those returning had tested positive for Covid.
The medical service, which had set up testing centres in Uman and at the airport in Kyiv, said 2,000 pilgrims coming back from the Ukrainian city had tested positive for Covid. The service had sent a team of more than 100 medics and paramedics to Uman at the request of the Israeli government to help test the pilgrims.
After a tipoff, police identified pilgrims with fake paperwork as they arrived in Israel, escorting them home for mandatory quarantine amid fears that hundreds could have procured bogus tests.
The Israeli border and immigration service said it had received information that dozens of people who tested positive in Ukraine had boarded planes with false negative tests. On just one flight from Kyiv, 13 passengers were found to have forged tests, the Ynet website reported.
The prime minister, Naftali Bennett, condemned the scam. “The Israeli government takes a very serious view of patients who fraudulently enter Israel by falsifying documents and deliberately spread disease, which constitutes an irresponsible act of harming public peace,” his office said.
Bennett said anyone caught using forged paperwork would be prosecuted, including potential charges of fraud, forgery and deliberately spreading disease.
The scandal comes at a sensitive time in Israel, which hoped that the latest wave of the Covid pandemic, driven by the Delta variant, had been brought under control.
According to reports in Israeli media, pilgrims who had received positive Covid tests at crowded testing centres in Uman before returning home were later approached with offers of forged documents for their journey.
The health ministry director general, Nachman Ash, said: “We are hearing that there are not a small number of infected people, those that tested positive over there, and we expect more people to be diagnosed here, too.”
The Uman pilgrimage is the latest large religious festival to be implicated in spreading infection. The Hindu festival Kumbh Mela was last year blamed for increasing infections in India and Nepal, while pilgrims to the Iranian city of Qom were implicated in the early spread of Covid in Iran.
U.S. Customs officials seize 3,000 faked vaccination cards shipped through Anchorage
Federal customs officials have seized more than 3,000 fake COVID-19 vaccination cards at shipping warehouses processing international cargo in Anchorage, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said Thursday.
“The shipments of these cards are low-quality printing, and closely resemble the authentic CDC certificates provided by healthcare providers when administering the COVID vaccine,” the agency said in a statement Thursday.
The counterfeit certificates are coming from China and being distributed around the United States, said Kymberly Fernandez, an assistant area port director with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Anchorage.
Anchorage is a hub for international cargo flights.
Vaccination mandates have stoked an illegal marketplace for counterfeit vaccination record cards nationally. Faking the certificates is illegal under federal law that bars unauthorized use of official government seals.
Fernandez said a criminal investigation into the faked cards is ongoing.
Nepal Seeks to Ban 2 Climbers It Says Faked Everest Summit
KATHMANDU, Nepal — The pictures seemed to show them at the top of the world, the summit of Mount Everest, and tourism officials in Nepal presented the two climbers with coveted certificates stating they had reached the world’s highest peak.
But veteran mountaineers said they saw a lie in the photographic details: An oxygen mask with no tube connecting it to an oxygen tank, no reflections of snow or mountains in a man’s sunglasses and limp flags in a place known for lacerating winds. The pictures were faked, they said, and so was the climb.
Now, the authorities in Nepal are seeking to ban the two Indian mountaineers who submitted the photographs from climbing Mount Everest and other Nepalese peaks for 10 years, after a government investigation concluded that they had doctored the images showing they had made it to the summit when in fact they had not.
The climbers, Narender Singh Yadav and Seema Rani Goswami, claimed they had reached the top of the mountain in 2016, though at the time local Sherpas and others questioned that.
Still tourism officials in Nepal presented them with the Everest certificates after the two climbers submitted photographs the Nepalese government now says were faked.
Mr. Yadav and Ms. Goswami, who were not especially well known before this controversy, come from a northern Indian state, Haryana, that has rewarded successful climbers in the past.
“Their claims for Everest summit couldn’t be established,” said Pradip Kumar Koirala, a Nepalese tourism official, on Monday. Mr. Koirala, who led the investigation of the duo, which began in August, added, “We have recommended action against them.”
Mr. Yadav said in an interview that he has all the proof required to show he reached the top of the mountain. He has filed a police complaint against his guide in Nepal, who he said was misleading people by denying that he had scaled the peak. Ms. Goswami did not respond to questions posed by The New York Times.
Nepal, one of Asia’s poorest nations and the site of most Everest climbs, has been struggling to root out bogus summiteers. But, in the past few years, the number of people faking Everest claims has sharply increased, from a few a decade ago to dozens every year.
Investigations have been rare in Nepal, a country hungry for every climbing dollar it can get. It has issued more and more Everest permits in recent years, leading sometimes to climbers pushing and shoving each other and creating a dangerous human traffic jam on the roof of the world.
For climbing the world’s highest mountain, people in India are often given national awards. If they are already working for the government, they are sometimes given promotions and lifelong benefits. Expedition organizers say the flow of climbers from India has increased in recent years as the perks have become better known.
But it was the prospect of that kind of recognition that undid the claim of Mr. Yadav and Ms. Goswami.
In August, Mr. Yadav was selected as one of the recipients of the prestigious Indian mountaineering award. But Indian mountaineers and Sherpas who said they had seen Mr. Yadav descending to Everest Base Camp without reaching the summit started posting comments online questioning the government’s intention.
The Indian government decided to withhold the award pending an investigation. India’s sports ministry, which confers the award, said it was looking into claims that Mr. Yadav had doctored photos and sought clarification form Nepalese tourism officials.
The Nepalese government was forced to open an investigation. Veteran climbers and many mountaineers questioned Mr. Yadav’s climbing credentials and challenged details in his pictures.
The investigating committee interrogated Mr. Yadav’s team leader, Naba Kumar Phukon. In an interview Mr. Phukon said he told the panel that Mr. Yadav and Ms. Goswami never summited Everest.
“I don’t know how he got certificate without any photos of the summit,” Mr. Phukon said. The company that organized the duo’s trip said it had “no role at all in morphing the photos.”
Nepal’s most severe penalty for fake claims is to ban climbers from all of the country’s mountains. It does not impose fines on them.
Such claims have become a recurring problem. In 2016, two Indian police officers, a husband and wife team, were fired from their jobs after an inquiry found they had faked their Everest climb. The Indian couple said they had achieved a lifelong goal of reaching the summit, but Nepalese authorities later said the climbers had doctored photographs that appeared to show a successful climb.
In 2019, the tourism ministry in Nepal removed at least five names from its list of Everest summiteers after questions were raised about their climbs. The investigation into those accusations is still underway.
Climbers in India welcomed Nepal’s steps against Mr. Yadav and Ms. Goswami. “This will discourage fakers,” said Satyarup Siddhanta, an Indian mountaineer. “If the Nepal government develops a web portal and posts all summit pictures that will help to detect fakers.”
Nepalese authorities said their investigation found that Mr. Yadav and Ms. Goswami had reached an elevation of more than 27,000 feet, about 2,000 feet short of the summit. That height is known as the “death zone,” where the air is so thin that even with bottled oxygen, the brain and body begin to fail.
Their guide warned them that their oxygen supply was depleted and that they were not physically fit enough to reach the summit, and they were rescued, the investigation found. Lakpa Sherpa, a rescuer who was part of the operation, said both Mr. Yadav and Ms. Goswami were running out of supplemental oxygen and their condition was worsening fast.
Bhadra Sharma reported from Kathmandu, and Sameer Yasir from Srinagar, Kashmir.