A video of Indian cricketer Virat Kohli demanding the death penalty for the rape accused in the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital case is altered using a fake audio.
BOOM found that the original video has taken from an old podcast interview and has been overlaid with a fake audio.
On August 9, 2024, a 31-year-old trainee doctor was raped and murdered while on night shift duty at Kolkata's RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. The victim, a second-year MD student in the Chest Medicine department, was found dead in the hospital's seminar hall. This tragic crime ignited nationwide protests from the medical community and civil society groups, demanding improved safety for women in India. The incident has also fueled a wave of false and misleading claims, along with conspiracy theories, on social media.
In the viral video, which is in black and white and includes photos of the deceased Kolkata doctor, Kohli can be heard saying, "Whatever happened with Dr. (victim's name) is very wrong, I would want that all rapist should get the death penalty, so that any rapist thinks 1000 times before doing such a thing".
The nine seconds video is being shared on Instagram with the caption when translated to English reads, "Even Virat Sir has supported this."
FACT-CHECK: Manipulated Video Of Kohli Demanding Death Penalty For Rapists
BOOM found that the viral video of Virat Kohli demanding the death penalty in the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital case is manipulated. The video has been taken from an old podcast interview whereas the audio is likely to have been made with an AI voice cloning tool.
Original video from 2022 RCB Podcast interview
BOOM broke the video into key-frames and ran a revers image search using Google Lens, which search results showed that the clip is old dating back to 2022.
We found a post by Royal Challengers Bengaluru (@RCBTweets) with a snippet of the interview posted in February 2022.
We then checked the full interview posted on RCB's YouTube channel on February 26, 2022, in which Kohli talks about how the India Premier League changed his life.
The video pre-dates the RG Kar Medical College and Hospital rape and murder case. In the below original video we can see the same visuals as in the viral video.
Audio likely generated using AI voice generator: Deepfake detection tool analysis
We then ran an analysis of the audio using a deepfake detection tool developed by TrueMedia.org a non-profit organisation.
TrueMedia.org’s tool, currently available to journalists and fact-checkers approved by the non-profit, detected that the audio had "substantial evidence of manipulation". The result stated that the there was evidence that the audio was generated by an AI audio generator.
Kohli Has Not Spoken On Kolkata Rape & Murder Case So Far
The cricketer has not made any public remarks on the case so far.
BOOM previously debunked a viral claim that peddled a 2017 video of Kohli condemning an incident of mass molestation on New Year's Eve in Bengaluru, as the Kolkata case.