A video of a Pakistani man admitting to stealing electricity and threatening to kill anyone who stops him from doing so is being falsely shared as a Muslim man in India.
BOOM found that the video is from an incident in Karachi from July 27, 2020 and is not from India.
In the video, a man who identifies himself as Mufti Atta-ur-Rehman Swati admits to stealing electricity by using a hook attached to a power line and states that he would either die or kill before he lets anyone remove the hook.
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The video has gone viral on social media with users insinuating that the Taliban's capture of Afghanistan has emboldened Muslims in India to break laws.
The video is being shared with the caption: Special video for the people of Delhi. Listen to what the person in the video is saying. I will steal electricity. Won't listen. I will die or kill. The Taliban is being born inside the country itself. (Original Hindi caption: दिल्ली वालों के लिए विशेष वीडियो - सुनिये वीडियो में शख्स क्या बोल रहा है। बिजली चोरी करूंगा ! नहीं मानूंगा। मरूंगा या मारूंगा। ये तालिबान तो देश के भीतर ही पैदा हो रहा है")
An archive of the tweet can be found here.
An archive of the tweet can be found here.
An archive of the tweet can be found here.
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The video has also been shared with the false claims on Facebook multiple times.
Fact-check
Using InVID's fake news debunker, we broke the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on Yandex. We found this tweet from July 27, 2020 by K-Electric, an energy company which supplies electricity to the Pakistani city of Karachi.
A user in the replies posted a YouTube link which featured a longer video of the incident shot from the opposite angle. The description of the video claimed that K-Electric had served the Swati a bill of 1.7 million Pakistani rupees.
Comparing both videos, we determined that the longer video was shot on the Swati's phone.
After establishing that the incident occurred in Karachi, we searched for news reports using Urdu keywords and found this July 31, 2020 report on Urdupoint. The report stated that the man in the video, Mufti Atta-ur-Rehman Swati was allegedly stealing electricity by using a hook. When confronted by officials, he stated that he would either die or be killed before he allows anyone to remove the hook from the power line.
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We also found a news report by ARY News on the incident.
