A disturbing video showing several individuals, with some in police uniform, torturing a man subdued on the floor is being shared on social media with the claim that it shows a real instance of police brutality.
BOOM found this claim to be false; our fact-check reveals that the video going viral has been scripted and enacted, and uploaded on YouTube by a channel named Vipin Pandey Entertainment Production, and does not show a real instance of torture in police custody.
The video was shared on Twitter by a user with a Hindi caption, which translated as, "Don't know where this video is from, but strict action should be taken against these savage policemen, the government has filled so much hatred that people have come down to brutality."
Click here to view an archive of the above tweet.
The video went viral, garnering over 24000 views in less than a day.
Fact-Check
Looking through the comments of the tweets, BOOM found a few replies that implied that the video was not real, but was uploaded by a YouTube creator.
We them ran some of the keyframes of the video on Google reverse image search, which led us to the exact same video uploaded on YouTube Shorts by YouTube channel Vipin Pandey Entertainment Production.
The caption of the video read, "Coming soon video So please support my youtube channel #trending #youtube #baby #cutebaby #ytshorts", which indicated that it may be part of a scripted video.
Looking through the videos uploaded by the channel, we came across the full version of the scripted video, which was 12 minutes in length and titled 'dosti ki saza' (click here for archive), which translates as "punishment for friendship".
The caption of the video provided the names of the individuals involved in creating the video, including producers, actors and writers. It also included a text in Hindi, which translates as, "Delhi Sakshi murder case: How 16-year-old witness was killed with knife and stone in Delhi's Shahbad Dairy area : We have tried to show in the video, and we want to give this message through this video, that we should attract our sons and daughters towards us so that they should tell everything about us."
We looked through the other videos uploaded by the channel, and found that it has uploaded other dramatised and scripted videos as well.
