It is one of the most visceral war photographs of all time: A naked, crying 9-year-old girl, her arms outstretched and her face contorted with pain in the aftermath of a napalm attack.

Behind her loom soldiers, while she is surrounded by the wailing faces of four other fleeing children, the entire sky behind them blotted out by thick black smoke.

It’s hailed as the most famous image of the Vietnam conflict and won a Pulitzer Prize following publication in 1972 for photographer “Nick” Huynh Cong Ut.

But a documentary now claims the Associated Press has been deceived about who took the frame for over 50 years.

Adding fuel to the movie’s theories, it was nominated for four News & Documentary Emmy Awards, including “Outstanding Investigative Documentary,” this year.

There is no question Ut was on the scene and shooting pictures of the girl in question, later revealed to be named Phan Thị Kim Phúc, now 63.

But Netflix documentary “The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo” alleges it was actually a freelance photographer named Nguyễn Thành Nghe who took the famed photo, and he was paid just $20 as a “stringer” by the agency for submitting his pictures.

The documentary claims Horst Faas, the AP’s photo director in Saigon, recognized the photo’s iconic potential and insisted it be falsely credited to Ut, so the agency and their staff photographer would take all the credit.

The photo, officially called “Terror of War,” was taken around seven years after US ground troops started fighting in the war on June 8, 1972. South Vietnamese soldiers had napalmed the village of Trảng Bàng, thinking North Vietnamese troops were hiding in it, but instead hit civilians on their own side.

Phúc was fleeing, her back burning from the after-effects of the chemical bombing.

Underscoring the frame’s impact, a voiceover in “The Stringer” states, “It was such a shocking image that it has seared itself into the collective consciousness of the American people.”

Ut was just 21 at the time and was working for AP in Saigon, following in the footsteps of his older brother, who also took photos for the wire service and had been killed in the conflict in 1965. Another brother, who was in the military, died in combat as well.

Ut maintains that, without question, he took the picture.

“These accusations strike at the very core of who I am. My entire career has been built on telling the truth, often at great personal risk,” he said in a public statement this year. 

Questions first emerged in December 2022 when Gary Knight, producer of “The Stringer” and a highly regarded photojournalist, was contacted by Carl Robinson, a former photo editor in the AP Saigon office.

Robinson, around 80 at the time, stated Nick Ut did not take the “Napalm Girl” photo, as it is colloquially known.

“It was weighing on my shoulders for all those years,” he told The Post. “I had flashbacks every time the picture would appear. When the 50th anniversary came around in 2022, it was all over the news. I really wanted to tell Nghe that I was sorry.”

Robinson was working under Faas in ’72. He claimed his take-charge boss ordered him to alter the photo credit before the image — which Robinson initially feared would be unpublishable since it depicted a naked child — went out over the wire to newspapers around the world.

“I looked over my shoulder, [toward] the notebook where all the film had been logged in, to get the stringer’s name,” Robinson added.

“That’s when Horst leaned down into my right ear and said, ‘Make it Nick Ut.’”

Robinson, who did not want to cross Faas, told The Post he did as he was told.

In a 2019 article published in the Australian Financial Review, Robinson wrote he “hated that damn photo editor’s job at AP and wanted to quit.”

He also references that “opium allowed me to accept the way things were” and that he “came back to work in the afternoon stoned … [before] the late afternoon workload sobered everyone up.” Robinson told The Post that he was not under the influence of drugs that day.

Nghe’s photos may have been bought by AP but he had been working as a driver for an NBC news crew on the fateful day. He says he took the photos as the girl and a boy came running down the road.

Asked which photo is his, Nghe says in the doc, “The one with the naked girl whose clothes were burned. Nick Ut came with me on the assignment, but he did not take that photo. He just took some photos from afar. That photo was mine.”

Nghe had been working for NBC, which was located next to AP’s offices. He has claimed he submitted his photos to AP and was paid shortly after and given a print of what came to be called “Napalm Girl.” Not questioning things further, he added, “I took the $20 and took the other guys for a drink and that was it.”

AP’s office manager in charge of payments at the time, Tu Tran Pease, disputes this version of events.

Decades later, his perspective changed. Nghe, who now lives in California, stated in the doc, “I worked hard for it. But that guy [Ut] got to have it all. He got the recognition. He got the rewards.”

In the documentary, Nghe’s family members maintain he frequently talked about having taken the photo. It is alleged his wife, upset by the subject matter of it, tore up his original print.

Ut did not cooperate with the documentary and has launched a defamation lawsuit against Netflix and Knight in a French court, claiming he is being defamed by the movie.

“It accuses Nick of having built his reputation and fame on a picture he knew he didn’t take. That he built his reputation fraudulently, that’s the essence of the defamation,” Ut’s lawyer, James Hornstein, told The Post. The trial is scheduled to start in Feb. 2027.

Haas died in 2012. Another photographer who was on the scene at the same time, David Burnett, has long claimed Ut took the picture.

“It was chaotic and it was crazy. But I have a solid memory of what happened that day, and I see Nick take the picture.

“I have nothing but sympathy for what Mr. Nghe and his family went through. But they’ve done nothing to prove that he shot the picture. What they’ve tried to do is prove that Nick did not shoot it,” Burnett told The Post.

The AP launched their own investigation. It found that although Ut has always claimed the image was taken with a Leica camera, the photo was actually more likely taken with a Pentax, the brand Nghe was using at the time.

However, AP noted Ut also carried a Pentax camera with him. His lawyer claims it was Haas who told him it was a Leica print.

The investigation found only two negative images from the film roll in its archive, but said this was standard procedure at the time. It concluded the picture could have been shot by Ut, but could not conclusively prove it. Robinson declined to speak with AP for the investigation.

“The AP has concluded that there is not the definitive evidence required by AP’s standards to change the credit of the 53-year-old photograph,” the report states.

However, the World Press Photo Foundation has suspended Ut’s credit for the photo.

Part of the evidence filed by Ut’s attorney with the court in France is a sworn declaration by Pease maintaining that on June 8, 1972 and the following day, “No stringer was paid for the ‘Terror of War’ [aka, “Napalm Girl”] photo … If that had occurred, I was the person who kept the cash on hand, and I was the person at AP who had to make the payment.”

As for Phúc, the girl in the photo, she was taken to a nearby hospital — by Ut himself, in some tellings. The two have since become friends. Although she has undergone many treatments to her wounds, Phúc still bares scars across her back and arm from the attack.

She studied in Cuba and married in 1992, and is now a mother of two who lives near Toronto with her husband.