Viral Video Linking Harassment and Police Action to UP Found to Be Misleading
A disturbing video is being shared with a claim, “Abdul used to harass school girls almost every day. His activities were captured on CCTV cameras. The rest of the work was done by UP Police. Do you support this action of the police?” The video is the amalgamation of 2 sets of scenarios. Part 1 shows a CCTV footage in which a person is seen molesting college girls. In the 2nd part of the same video, it is seen that the police are beating the accused and he has already been arrested.
Fact Check
When investigated, the DFRAC team found that the claim was misleading and did not belong to Uttar Pradesh. The incident of the man who is seen molesting the girls in the first part of the video is from Parbhani, Maharashtra. We ran a reverse search image of the key frame of the video. We found the same video was reported on by ABP Manjha dated 9 Dec 2024 with the caption “Parbhani Crime- a serious incident in Parbhani captured on CCTV camera.
Upon further investigation, another media report from Lokmat 9 dec 2024, provided more information about the incident and informed that the accused who molested the girls was caught by identifying the bike number by the police.
For the second set of the video, we at DFRAC again ran a reverse search image of the keyframe, in which the video, it is revealed that the man who is seen getting beaten up by the police is from Narsinghpur in Madhya Pradesh and not from Uttar Pradesh. we found the original video uploaded on an Instagram account on Dec 9, 2024, with the caption of the video as “the Gadarwara Police were seen beating the accused while taking him away in connection with the murder of Madhur Chaurasia.”
The man in the video murdered a person on the account of borrowed money as reported by Dainik Bhasker, dated 5 Dec 2024. Further, Navabharat reported that the accused was arrested within a few hours after the incident.
Conclusion
After a thorough investigation at DFRAC, it is evident that the viral video that is being circulated widely is not from UP but an edited version of 2 separate incidents from Maharashtra and MP and has no connection to Uttar Pradesh.
