Disturbing footage showing a mentally ill man break into a mosque and run around naked in Karachi, Pakistan is being shared with a false claim that the clip shows a member of the Tablighi Jamaat in an isolation centre in Uttar Pradesh for COVID-19.
The 28-second clip shows a naked man inflicting harm on himself by banging his head and breaking glass doors and running around indoors as bystanders can be heard shouting.
The video is being shared with the misleading caption, "Jamati in isolation in UP!!".
Note: BOOM has decided not to include the video in the story as it is explicit in nature.
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The same video is being shared with the false claim in Hindi on Facebook which when translated from Hindi reads, "The people of Tabligi Jamaat have created obscenity and terror…."
(तबलीगी जमात के लोगों ने अश्लीलता और आतंक मचा रखा है...... कोरोंनटाइन में जमकर किया हंगामा. सरम नाम की सारी हदें कर दी पार. खेला नंगा नाच. वीडियो हुवा वाइरल प्रशासन है इन लोगो से परेशान)
Viral on Facebook
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FACT-CHECK
We broke the video into key-frames and performed a reverse image search using Yandex - a Russian search engine, which showed that the video is old and from last year.
BOOM found that the incident in the video is of a mentally ill man who broke into a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan. The clip dates back to August 2019.
The search results showed that the same video was uploaded on November 4, 2019, on this website which shows that it is not a recent video as is being claimed.
On searching for clues in the video, we noticed the green carpet on the floor and men in skull caps standing around which made us guess that the place could be a mosque.
We then looked for the phrase 'naked man in mosque' on YouTube and found a longer video with the caption that said the video was from Karachi, Pakistan.
The 2.48 minutes YouTube video was uploaded on August 25, 2019, by a channel Top Trends with the caption, "Naked man entered in Mosque, Gulshan e Hadeed Karachi".
In the longer version of the video, a person is following the naked man on his bike before the man enters the mosque. The description of the video when translated from Urdu reads, "An unidentified man broke into the Khalid Bin Walid mosque of the Ahl-e-Hadith school district on Gulshan-e-Hadid Phase 2 Double Road and the imam's place lay down after the glasses were damaged."
On searching with the same caption in Urdu, we found an older video dated August 23, 2019, on a Facebook page Pakistan Today Webtv, which stated that the naked man was identified as Shafiq Abro after being arrested by Steel Town Police, Karachi and according to reports, he is mentally ill.
We searched with the Urdu caption (کراچی : گلشن حدید فیز ٹو کی مسجد میں ایک پاگل شخص کی توڑ پھوڑ) from the Facebook post and found that multiple small Pakistani news pages had posted the viral video.
We also found another video which shows the same man covered in blood and flies lying in the back of a pickup van. The man appeared to be in a delirious state. Alt News had previously debunked this false claim.
The video is the latest in a series of misinformation targeting the Muslim community in India after several people who took part in a religious congregation of the Tabligh-e-Jamaat''s Markaz in Delhi earlier last month, tested positive for the coronavirus.
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The event which lasted a few weeks in early March and which ended before a total lockdown was announced on March 24, saw attendees from outside India. The event continued despite restrictions on large gatherings and movement of people in many parts of the country. The organisers of the gathering are now under fire from the Indian government and the mainstream media.
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