New Images of Syria\'s First Lady and Iran\'s Space Monkey Cast Doubt on Two Reports

Bad news, readers: new images appear to cast doubt on the accuracy of two of the week’s most widely-reported stories â€" the rumored pregnancy of Syria’s first lady, and the pioneering space flight of an Iranian monkey.

As the Washington Post correspondent Liz Sly reported, President Bashar al-Assad’s office posted five new photographs of his wife, Asma, on Facebook, as part of an effort to disprove a curious aside in a Lebanese newspaper report that she is pregnant. In each of thephotographs, said to have been taken last week in Damascus, a very slender Mrs. Assad was pictured congratulating the winners of this year’s Syrian Science Olympiad.

A screenshot from the Facebook page of the Syrian president’s office, said to show the first lady meeting prize-winning science students in Damascus last week.

As my colleague Rick Gladstone explained, “rumors that Mrs. Assad had conceived in June,” were first reported in November by Al Bawaba, an Amman-based news Web site.

The photographs were released a day after Mr. Assad’s office issued an indignant statement taking exception to a Washington Post blogger’s reading of the Lebanese newspaper’s story. The statement said the blogger, Max Fisher, “based his analysis on false allegations that led him to wrong results which are far from reality.”

Since Syria’s Science Olympiad takes placeevery year, the president’s office could have recycled images of the first lady that were taken a year or more earlier, but that would require the cooperation of all of the students pictured with her in the photographs. At least one of the students pictured with Mrs. Assad in the new photographs, a girl with curly hair wearing brightly-patterned sneakers, does appear in another image of the winners posted on the Olympiad’s Facebook page.

While this set of images appears to back the official story coming out of Damascus, recently released photographs and video of the monkey that Iran says it sent into space seem to undermine Tehran’s claims.

Video broadcast on Iranian television this week showed what officials said were images of a monkey before and after a space flight.

As journalists at the German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle pointed out on its Persian language site on Thursday, the first reports on the space mission published in Iran’s state-run media showed an anxious-looking monkey prepared for blast-off with a prominent mole above his right eye.

An image of a monkey Iran claims to have sent into space this week, in a screenshot from an Iranian state news organization.

When Iran got around to releasing photographs and video of the monkey’s capsule being retrieved post-flight, there was no trace of a mole on his brow in the close-ups of him waiving to reporters or smiling for the cameras at a subsequent public appearance.

Iranian Students’ News Agency A monkey Iran claims to have sent into space, during a public appearance this week.

That led to speculation that Iran might have attempted to cover up a failed space mission by displaying a different monkey than the one that actually made a 150-mile round trip into the thermosphere and back. Or that the newly famous monkey had fallen prey to the Iranian penchant for cosmetic surgery.

DW: Iranian Astro Monkey went t space with a mole on his face, came back without it. Plastic surgery #iran http://t.co/iN4jxecP

â€" negin shiraghaei (@neginsh) 31 Jan 13

The missing mole is not exactly hard evidence that Iranians had a spare monkey waiting in the wings to pretend he’d just got back from space, but Iran does have a track record of fictionalizing its achievements in the field of rocket-science. Last July, however, the Iranian Students’ News Agency â€" which released photographs of the monkey with and without the mole this week â€" did report that the space agency in Tehran had five monkeys in training for the mission.