The man who took the photo used in a Donald Trump Jr tweet comparing Skittles to refugees says he is a former refugee himself, and that he did not give permission for the photo’s use.

The tweet, which has drawn public ire and unsurprisingly sparked a massive social-media backlash, claimed to be an analogy of “our Syrian refugee problem” that “says it all”.

“If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?” it reads.

David Kittos, who took the photo, said he would never approve of the use of the photo against refugees as he was a former refugee himself.

“I am now a British citizen, but I am Greek-Cypriot by birth and in 1974 I was a refugee because of the Turkish occupation,” the 48-year-old told the BBC.

“I was six years old. We lived in the area of Cyprus that is now under Turkish military control.

“We had to leave everything behind overnight. Our property and our possessions.”

Mr Kittos posted the image in January 2010 to Flickr after using it to test lighting, and said the photo was used without his permission.

“I don’t support his (Donald Trump’s) policies and I would never take his money to use it,” he said.

Flickr is often used as a source for photos under the Creative Commons license, which allows the free distribution of otherwise copyrighted work.

But Mr Kittos’ image is listed under the “All Rights Reserved” license, which gives the owner full rights under copyright law.

He said he considered involving lawyers, but he did not know if he had the patience.

“This isn’t about the money for me. They could have just bought a cheap image from a micro stock library.”

So how accurate is the tweet?

Given that the post does not specify the size of the bowl of Skittles, it is impossible to say definitively that it is factually incorrect.

Instead, we can work out how large the bowl would need to be, in order to make the Skittles it contains representative of the risk posed to Americans by Syrian refugees.

Conservative think tank the CATO Institute has already done most of the hard work by calculating the statistical risk of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack by a refugee.

Their calculations are based on the number of Americans killed by refugees between 1975 and the end of 2015, and put the risk at one in 3.64 billion per year.

Leaving aside that this does not specify the nationality of the attacker, this puts the number of Skittles that would need to be in Mr Trump Jr’s aforementioned bowl at 10.92 billion, in order for three of those Skittles to be deadly.

A Skittle weighs on average about 1.062 grams.

So for Trump Junior’s analogy to be factually accurate, he would need to be talking about a bowl capable of holding 11,597 tonnes of Skittles — the equivalent of 1,932 African elephants.