An 11-month old video showing police brutality in a Sri Lankan prison has gone viral on social media with false claims. The captions shared with the video misleadingly claim that it shows the mistreatment of Muslims in a detention camp in Assam.
BOOM noticed a 6-minute long video of a prison camp, showing prison officials subjugating the inmates through a series of mistreatments.
Warning: The video can be distressing for some people.
Screenshot of the video. Click here to view an archived version.
The video was shared with a caption, that reads: "Muslims are in detention camps in Assam. May Allah protect all of them - Ameen Ya Rab. 🤲" In less than 24 hours, It has been shared more than 11,000 times and had garnered more than 108,000 views on Facebook.
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BOOM searched for the caption on Facebook and found that the same video has been shared multiple times over the past 24 hours with the same caption.
The video is viral as protests grip several parts of the country against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a proposed exercise to weed out illegal immigrants but whose critics argue that it is discriminatory particularly toward Indian Muslims.
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Upon observing the video closely, BOOM noticed a watermark of TruthLanka.com - a defunct Sri Lankan news website.
A text search of relevant key words led us to an Asia Times article from January 17, 2019, carrying a screenshot of the viral video. According to the article, the CCTV footage showed inmates being made to crawl and then beaten with batons by prison officials in a Sri Lankan prison in Angunakolapelessa.
According to Asia Times,the video was shot in November 2018 when Sri Lanka faced a constitutional crisis and lacked an active government.
'The video footage obtained from two cameras, situated on either side of the yard, depicts prisoners being rounded up and assaulted from 8.56am till 9.18am on the morning of November 22,' the article said.
BOOM also found a shorter version of the same video, uploaded on YouTube by a Sri Lankan news website called Colombo Telegraph in January 16, 2019. The title of the video said, "Protesting Prisoners At Agunakolapelessa Prison Brutally Assaulted -part 1", thus confirming that the video is indeed from a prison in the south of Sri Lanka.