Fact Check: Did millions of cockroaches recently emerge from the ground in Mecca?

Fact Check en Featured Misleading-en

A video is getting viral on social media sites claiming that the holiest site in Islam, the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia’s sacred city of Mecca, has been bombarded by cockroaches.

An account with the username @MuslimsofTiktok, shared this video on twitter and writes, “In Mecca, millions of cockroaches came out from under the ground, so the prayer was stopped and everyone ran away. This is Karma for all the evil and suffering they are causing the world.”

source : twitter

many others too shared the video with same claim:

source : youtube

Fact Check:

To check the authenticity of the viral claim DFRAC team did a keyword search and found the same video uploaded four years ago on a YouTube channel with the caption, “’Locusts’ Plague Mecca Grand Mosque.”

source : youtube

The same was covered by a media site called Newsweek on 1/11/19 with the caption, “Mecca’s Grand Mosque, the World’s Holiest Muslim Site, Is Under Attack by Locusts.”

Conclusion:

The video is being shared with a misleading claim as the incident is not of recent times, but is of four years ago. Also the attack was not of cockroaches but was of locusts.

Hence, the claim of social media users is misleading