Lighthouse Journalism found a video being shared on the social media platforms, where two girls were seen being kidnapped from a lift. It was claimed along with the video that the incident happened in Bangalore, Karnataka. During the investigation we found that the video is from Egypt and not India.
Claim:
X user Soumya Ranjan Nayak shared the video on social media handle.
Check the archive version of the post here.
Other users too are sharing the same claim along with the video.
Investigation:
We started our investigation by running a reverse image search on the keyframes obtained from the video.
Through this we found a news report on alarabiya.net.
The report said: After a video of the kidnapping of two girls occupied the entire Egyptian street during the past two days, the mother revealed new information. Heba Hassan, the mother of the two girls, Jana and Hanin, who were drugged in the elevator of their home, confirmed that she found one of the girls drugged in the street when she returned from work quickly after receiving news of their kidnapping.
This confirmed that the video is from Egypt. The article was published on December 21, 2023.
We found a post on the Instagram handle of lovincairo.
The post stated: After a video showed two girls getting kidnapped in the elevator, the Ministry of the Interior has announced the arrest of two men. One of them appeared in the video with the father of the two girls, and the other was the driver of the car used in the incident. After questioning, they confessed to their involvement in the incident, which was planned in coordination with the girls’ father in exchange for money. Public Prosecution is now handling the investigation.
We also found several news reports about the incident.
Conclusion: Old video from Egypt, goes viral with claims of two girls being kidnapped from an elevator in Bangalore. Viral claim is misleading.
