Lighthouse Journalism discovered a video widely shared on social media showing a policeman being beaten. The video was accompanied by claims that a politician was responsible for the assault. The users also used the hashtag ‘Rajasthan police’ to suggest that the video was from Rajasthan. However, our investigation revealed that the video is old and shows a gym owner misbehaving with the policeman.
Claim:
X user Riya Meena shared the video with the misleading claim.
Other users too are sharing the video with similar claims.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by uploading the video in the InVid tool and running a reverse image search on the screenshots obtained from the video.
We found a video posted on X, that indirectly prompted the person assaulting the policeman could have been a politician.
Google’s reverse image search did not give us any results, so we ran a reverse image search on the screenshots using Yandex, a Russian search engine.
This led us to the YouTube channel Odisha Bytes, where this video was uploaded three years ago.
The title of the video said: Viral alert: Police allegedly thrashed by gym owner in Delhi.
The description said: A video of a Delhi police cop is being assaulted by some people inside a house has gone viral on social media. The cop is being repeatedly slapped and abused. Delhi Police has initiated a probe after the incident came into their knowledge
We found more news reports about the incident.
The report states: The police have registered a case against a gym owner and his accomplices and have also suspended two policemen a day after a video surfaced online purportedly showing one of the on-duty policemen being assaulted by them, the police said on Thursday. Two policemen in the video, identified as Sushil and Ravinder, have been suspended for allegedly not informing senior officers about the alleged incident.
Conclusion: An old video from 2021 showing an on-duty policeman in Delhi being assaulted by a gym owner is being falsely shared with claims that a politician recently attacked the officer. The video does not involve any politician, the viral claim is misleading.
