CNN News18 ran a nearly four-year-old video on Monday as a recent incident and falsely claimed that it showed a Chinese engineer caught on camera beating his Pakistani driver in Karachi.
The television channel's misreporting comes at a time when an anti-China sentiment in India is high following a border clash between Indian and Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley, Eastern Ladakh on June 15-16, 2020 which resulted in the death of 20 Indian soldiers.
In the 50 seconds clip, a man wearing a blue T-shirt can be seen flogging a man with a stick, while third man in a yellow t-shirt stands by and watches on.
The English news channel misreported the video as recent with one of its news anchors claiming that it shows a Chinese engineer working on the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) beating up a Pakistani engine driver in Karachi.
(NOTE - The below video contains graphic violence, viewer discretion is advised)
Click here to view, and here for an archive.
In the tweet, the channel further claimed that the incident was linked to the fallout of a CPEC project which was not making the desired progress.
The channel appears to have picked up the video from social media where it was viral.
Click here to view an archive.
Click here to view an archive.
Viral on Facebook
On searching on Facebook with the same caption we found that the viral video was being shared with the misleading claim.
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the video reported by CNN News 18 dates back online to November 2016 and was widely reported by several Malaysian websites.
On breaking the video into key-frames and performing a reverse image search using Google Images, the search results showed that the video was old and not a recent incident.
Click here to view.
Click here to view.
The article states that the victim pleaded with the man in the blue t-shirt, however, he beat him repeatedly while another man wearing a yellow t-shirt with a Bersih 5 logo watched the assault and did not intervene.
BOOM found that the logo visible on the yellow t-shirt worn by the man the video is from a pro-democracy group named Bersih 5 in Malaysia.
Various articles from 2016 and the logo on the yellow t-shirt worn by the man by in the video indicate that the video is from Malaysia. However, the identities and nationalities of the perpetrators and victim is unclear.
BOOM found that the same video uploaded in November 2016 to YouTube by Kwong Wah Yit Poh or Kwong Wah Daily - a Malaysian Chinese daily.
The caption when translated reads, "(Penang, 28th) A video of a severely beaten foreign worker circulated on social networks, arousing the anger of netizens. In the video, a man wearing a net T-shirt 5.0 T-shirt watched the abuse of foreign workers. ."
We also found several social media posts with the viral video posted in November 2016 posted with different captions.
BOOM could not independently verify the incident, however we were able to establish that the video is several years old and is likely to have been shot in Malaysia.