Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has done it again — tweeting without verifying and then deleting. The Kerala lawmaker on Wednesday re-tweeted a post that showed a ‘mistranslated’ sign at Delhi airport and it turned out that the photo was from 2015.

Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri tweeted a clarification on Wednesday saying it was a fake image. “Listen people. This is a morphed image doing the rounds since 2015. It resurfaced in 2019. AAI had pointed this out even then. Let us all do a bit of due diligence before putting such things out. Fake images & morphed pictures don’t do any good to people who are posting them,” the minister tweeted.

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A Twitter user shared the image this week tagging Tharoor and suggesting that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) needed his help to correct the language on the sign. “Farsh par khaana sakht mana hai,” the sign reads in Hindi, but the English translation “Eating carpet is strictly prohibited”, with the word “on” missing.

To this Tharoor replied with a now-deleted tweet, “They are incorrigible!”, as the screenshot shared by Puri shows.

This 2015 photo resurfaced in 2019 too, when actor Shabana Azmi had it. The AAI had at that time pointed out that it was fake. “Since 2015, this morphed image shown has been doing rounds time and again,” the Airports Authority of India said in its tweet at the time.

This is the third time this year that a tweet has landed Tharoor in a controversy. In April this year, the Congress leader wrongly tweeted about the demise of former Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan (78). He later deleted the tweet and apologised to Mahajan.

In March, Tharoor apologised for an incorrect reading of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech delivered on the occasion of Bangladesh’s 50th National Day. He said that based on a “quick reading”, he had tweeted that PM Modi had “omitted to acknowledge Indira Gandhi’s” role in Bangladesh liberation.

“I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong. Yesterday, on the basis of a quick reading of headlines and tweets, I tweeted ‘everyone knows who liberated Bangladesh’, implying that Narendra Modi had omitted to acknowledge Indira Gandhi. It turns out he did: Sorry!” Tharoor tweeted.