An old video showing a man firing shots using a burst fire gun is circulating on Twitter with false captions linking it to the ongoing Manipur violence.
BOOM found that this video has been present in social media much before the beginning of violence in Manipur.
The video is circulating with a caption that it shows scenes of Bharatiya Janata Party backed militants practicing with guns in Manipur to pursue violence in the state.
The North East state of Manipur has been reeling under massive outbreaks of violence and ethnic clashes between the local Kukis and Meiteis since two months. Amidst accusations from the opposition that the government has been dodging questions related to Manipur, the Centre on July 19 said that it will discuss the violence in the state during the monsoon session of the Parliament. According to latest reports, more than 35000 people have been moved to relief camps and 140+ people have lost their lives in the ethnic clashes so far.
The caption of one such tweet reads, "BJP supported insurgents are practicing with arms. Modiji, from where are they receiving dangerous weapons like 100-Round fully Automatic Gun? #ManipurViolence #ManipurBurning #ModiDisasterForIndia #Modi_Hatao_Desh_Bachao." (Original tweet in Hindi: #मणिपुर भाजपा समर्थक उग्रवादी हत्यार चलाने का अभ्यास करते हुए; मोदीजी इन उग्रवादियो के पास 100-Round fully Automatic Gun जैसे घातक हत्यार कहाँ से आ रहे है.)
The link of the tweet can be seen here. The archive of the tweet can be seen here.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a reverse image search on few of the keyframes of the video and found a social media post from October, 2022 by a page named IDIBI Firearms; According to the bio of the page, IDIBI Firearms is a firearms manufacturing group, based in South Africa.
The link of the post can be found here. BOOM then reached out to the company for more details on the video. The article will be updated if we get a response.
We then ran a search using the keyword, “100-Round fully Automatic Gun” and found a Reddit post from 11 months with the same video. The post can be found here.
The archive of the Reddit post can be viewed here.
We also found a Youtube channel “codytx44” with the same video. The video was uploaded to Youtube on March 29, 2022. The video has been captioned as," FULL AUTO GLOCK 100 ROUND DUMP".
The link of the video can be seen here
The description of the channel mentions that “codytx44” is mainly focused on videos based on arms and weapons. The Instagram handle also contains videos of weapons firing and testing in gun ranges, which do not appear to have been shot in India. While BOOM was unable to find the details about the video, we were able to establish that it has been on the internet much before sporadic violence broke out in the state of Manipur.