A man in southwestern China has been arrested on charges of spreading false rumors after a photo of a giant snake surfaced on social media.

According to SCMP, a picture of the snake went viral on Chinese social media, with the description describing it as a “giant dragon that caused a terrible earthquake in Sichuan province last month”. A magnitude 6 earthquake struck on June 17, killing 13 people. Most recently, a 50-year-old man surnamed Truong was arrested by the police for allegedly spreading false rumors, causing panic on social networks. It took China’s police force nearly a month to investigate the photo that caused “massive panic on social media”. Truong was identified as the person who posted the picture of the snake-like creature, but Truong wrote that “a giant dragon 120 meters long, 1.5 meters in diameter jumped out of the water, attracting thousands of curious people”. “Experts flocked to the area and said the dragon was related to the earthquake.” Although the photo is quite revealing, Truong still makes at least one woman believe that the dragon is real. “I told her the dragon was fake,” one woman said on Weibo. “But she got angry, thinking I was lying.”

After being taken into custody, Truong apologized and explained that he just wanted to joke after seeing a snake on social media. Others said that perhaps Truong did not know what the dragon looked like when he posted a picture of the snake-like creature. “I think this man confused what the dragon looks like,” said one commenter on Weibo. .

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.

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.