A video showing a man with guns threatening India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi with violence is going viral as a recent instance of a Pakistani Taliban leader threatening India.
BOOM found such posts to be misleading - our fact check revealed the video to be more than two years old, showing one Said Kabir Afridi - a local leader of Pakistan's Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a Sunni Deobandi political party.
This video is viral amidst rising amount of misinformation linked to Afghanistan and Taliban, since the latter's takeover of the the country. The video shows an armed man announcing takeover of Delhi and India. He then goes on to issue a threat to PM Modi and alerts him about an end to his rule.
Pakistani-born Canadian columnist Tarek Fateh shared the video on Twitter with the caption, "Here comes the threat to India by the Pakistani Taliban. "We will fly the Pakistan flag over Delhi in less than 24 hours," the pumpkin bellows. How does one country produce….?"
Click here to view an archive of the above tweet.
The same video with a similar caption was shared by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Ravinder Gupta, and some other Twitter users.
The video is also viral on Facebook as a recent one released by Pakistani Taliban militants after their takeover of Afghanistan.
Fact Check
BOOM did a few reverse image searches, using keyframes from the viral video. The search showed results from 2019, showing a similar video being viral two years ago.
One such video was uploaded on YouTube by user 'Greater Pakistan' on August 6, 2019, with the title - "Tribal pakhtun leader Sayed kabir afridi last warning to india".
Taking this as a cue, we performed several searches on Google, Twitter and Facebook with keywords "sayed kabir afridi", along with variations of the name, such as "said sayid kaber afridi".
We came across a Facebook page titled "Said kaber offecial page", and a Facebook account "Said Kabir Afridi" with posts from the same man seen in the viral video.
Looking through the videos posted by the page, we found the same viral video that was uploaded on February 22, 2019. The caption read, "Tribal leader Malik Syed Kabir Afridi has given a clear answer to Narendra Modi government. Please listen and help India. Don't forget to like and share."
The page identified the man in the viral video as Said Kabir Afridi, a leader of Pakistani political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam.
We looked through the Facebook profile, and found an image showing the a similar instance of Afridi posing with the gun.
While BOOM could not independently verify the identity of the man seen in the viral video, it shows that the video is at least two years old, and does not show a recent instance of a Pakistani Taliban leader threatening India.
This has been debunked earlier by India Today.
