Pakistan-Canadian columnist Tarek Fatah and other social media users are sharing a video of a young boy doing namaz on the road and falsely claiming that the video is from Pakistan. BOOM found that the video is not from Pakistan.
The video shows a young boy doing namaz while a security guard tries to persuade him to move. It also shows how other cars on the road are waiting to pass by and are not able to because of the boy, causing a slight traffic jam situation.
The video was shared by Tarek Fatah with the caption, "How does one country produce so many rectums? How does Pakistan do it?"
BOOM has previously fact-checked several false claims made by Fatah on his social media. Read here.
Click here to view the tweet and here for an archive.
Fatah's post is viral on Twitter, with as many as 1.5 million views, 2,500+ retweets, and over 12,000 likes as of writing this article.
Another user shared the post with the caption, "When you teach your children to do this and not study. You'll eventually end up being a state like #Pakistan. Mr. #ShehbazSharif, this is right time for you to end all radicalization and Islamization goals like Gazwa e Hind and start educating your children for future of Pak."
Click here to view the tweet and here for an archive.
The post is also viral on Facebook.
Click here to view.
FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the video is not from Pakistan, but somewhere in the middle east.
In order to ascertain whether the incident was from Pakistan or not, we considered two main visual elements from the viral video:
1. The food delivery executive with a bike
At the 0:08 timestamp, a food delivery executive can be seen in the background with his bike. We tried to identify the delivery service he was working for by matching the box on his bike to the logo of some popular food delivery companies in Pakistan. We found that companies such as Eat Mubarak, Food Geniez, Supermeal, and Careem Now were popular in Pakistan. However, none of their logo and branding matched the yellow, orange, and blue colour scheme of the food delivery box in the viral video.
The Arabic text on the back of the security guard's shirt gave us a hint that the video could also be from the middle east.
We broadened our search and looked for the most popular food delivery services in the middle east and found Talabat, a food delivery service based in the United Arab Emirates.
Talabat's delivery executive uniform and delivery box were an exact match to our viral video.
Here is a comparison:
In a blog by Talabat, we found that the company only operates in Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, and Jordan. Since they do not operate in Pakistan, we were able to narrow our search to these seven countries and rule out Pakistan.
2. The position of the driver in the car passing by
From the 0:55-0:57 segment of the video, it is also seen that the driver is sitting on the left side of the car.
Just like India, cars are driven on the left side of the road in Pakistan, which means that the driver is seated on the right hand side of the car. Since in this video, the hands of the driver on the steering wheel indicate that the driver seat is on the left hand side of the car, we were able to ascertain that the video is not from Pakistan, but from a middle eastern country where cars are driven on the right side of the road.
BOOM could not independently verify the exact location of the incident, but it is clear that the video is not from Pakistan.
A watermark on the video suggests that the video was first uploaded on TikTok by a user @ajom75uddin. We looked up this user on TikTok and found their profile with the same video, which had more than 6.8 million views.
We also found a user on Facebook with the same username and profile picture. It was mentioned that they are based in Dubai, UAE, and it is likely the video was shot there.
We have also reached out to this user to confirm the location of the incident. This story will be updated if they respond.