Picture of ‘giant dragon that caused Yibin earthquake’ lands Chinese man in detention

Suspect says manipulated image of snake was intended as ‘a bit of fun’, but police in city where tremor killed 13 people last month weren’t laughing

Man said on social media that a ‘120-metre-long giant dragon with a diameter of 1.5 meters jumped out of the water’

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A man has been detained for suggesting a giant dragon might have caused last month’s earthquake in Sichuan. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 7:14pm, 5 Jul 2019Updated: 11:04pm, 5 Jul 2019

A man from southwest China has been detained for spreading rumours after he posted a badly manipulated image of a snake on social media and claimed it was a dragon that might have caused last month’s deadly earthquake in Sichuan province.

Police in Yibin, where 13 people were killed by a magnitude 6 quake that struck on June 17, said the 50-year-old suspect, identified only as Zhang, was taken into custody on Wednesday in Chongqing, which neighbours Sichuan.

His detention, the term of which was not specified, came after a task force was set up to investigate the rumour that had “drawn much attention and caused huge panic”, police said in a statement on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform.

Zhang uploaded the image, which appears to show a huge snake emerging from a hillside, as hundreds of people casually look on, to Weibo last week.

Police set up a task force to track Zhang down after he posted this image on social media. Photo: Weibo

The caption with the image read: “A 120-metre [390-foot] giant dragon with a diameter of 1.5 metres jumped out of the water this afternoon, attracting thousands of people.

“Experts have flown here and it’s said the dragon had something to do with the earthquake.”