An extremely disturbing video of naked bodies, which look like corpses, piled over each other and being attended to by people in protective medical gear, is being shared with the false claim that it shows organ trafficking in COVID-19 patients in India. BOOM found that the undated clip traces back online to at least November 2020 and is not from India.
In the viral clip, we can hear a voiceover in Hindi making misleading claims with the language used trying to show that the video is from India. The Hindi audio has been dubbed where a man can be heard saying, "In the name of COVID-19 look what is happening."
Given the gruesom contents of the video, BOOM is not including it in the story.
Screenshot from viral clip
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FACT-CHECK
We broke the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search using Yandex, and found that the same clip has been circulating online on Russian social media and websites since November 2020.
We also found other fact-checks on the same clip by Verify Sy and Maldita debunking the same viral clip when it was being shared with the false claims that it showed bodies of Syrian detainees whose human organs were harvested by Russian doctors and more false claims that the video is from Brazil and Iran.
According to several Russian news reports, the same clip was circulated on Russian social media claiming it is from a morgue in a hospital in Novosibirsk. The same clip was posted by social activist Rostislav Antonov.
Russian website Komsomolskaya Pravda published a report dated November 10, 2021,following Antonov's post. This prompted a response by the Minister of Health of the Novosibirsk region in Russia denying that this recording was taken in one of their medical facilities.
According to a report by Russian media outlet Znak, several former employees acknowledged that the morgue in the viral clip is from Saint Petersburg, although the city's Forensic Office denied any connection to the viral video.
We found the viral clip circulating on Russian social media websites with the oldest dating back to November 2, 2020, however, they did not pinpoint the location of where the video was shot.
Russian social media post on the viral clip
We also found the same clip being shared with a voiceover in Spanish using the app PicVoice which shows that several false narratives have been attached to the viral video and being circulated.
On observing the video closely at the 11 seconds timestamp, in the corridor, we can spot the Russian alphabet L. The same was pointed out pointed out by the Syrian fact checker Verify Sy. Additionally, Verify Sy had also translated the recording in the original clip where one can hear people conversing in Russian. This indicates the viral clip is from Russia.
BOOM could not independently verify the incident or the origin of the video, however, we could establish that the clip is not from India.
(Additional reporting by Sujith A)
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