Above: A migrant takes a selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel outside a refugee camp near the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees after registration at Berlin’s Spandau district, Germany September 10, 2015.
(Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A Syrian refugee whose selfie with German Chancellor Angela Merkel went viral is suing Facebook for defamation, his lawyer said, after the social networking site failed to take down a series of posts accusing him of being a militant and criminal.
Anas Modamani, a 19-year-old refugee from Damascus, was pictured in September 2015 taking a selfie with Merkel during her visit to a refugee shelter in Berlin’s Spandau district.
The image came to define Germany’s response to the refugee crisis, when Merkel opened the country’s borders to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.
But in the following months Modamani’s image was shared on Facebook on a series of anonymous accounts, alongside posts claiming he was responsible for militant…