Claim: A video shows a woman from India surrounded by multiple men being harassed, touched inappropriately and manhandled.
Fact: The video is from Pakistan, and not India. It’s from August 2021 when a female TikToker was assaulted and harassed in Greater Iqbal Park in Lahore on Independence Day.
[Trigger warning: This fact-check contains content pertaining to an harassment]
Fact or Fiction?
On 27 December, X (formerly Twitter) user @StraightOOC shared a video of a woman being assaulted, claiming that the incident happened in India.
“What’s wrong in India?,” his tweet reads.
Soch Fact Check found the claim to be misleading. Searching key frames with Google Lens led us to an article by the Daily Mail which carried the video on 25 August 2021. The report is titled, “Woman making TikTok video is sexually abused by crowd tearing off her clothes in Pakistan: Police investigate HUNDREDS of men after attack.”
According to the report, the incident took place on 14 August 2021, at the Minar-e-Pakistan monument in the Greater Iqbal Park, but it was not reported until several days later. Following social media outrage, the Lorry Adda police registered a case against nearly 400 suspects for harassing and assaulting the woman.
Later, the woman identified as Ayesha Akram, blamed her associate Amir Sohail aka Rambo for making the plan to visit the park on Independence Day and claimed that he blackmailed her using some of her “obscene videos”.
In her statement to the police, the TikToker also nominated 12 others apart from Rambo, holding them responsible for the incident. However, Rambo had alleged that Akram wanted to extort money, around Rs 500,000 from each of the suspects in the case.
In February 2022, the Lahore High Court granted bail to prime suspect Rambo.
On 9 December 2022, a sessions court in Lahore issued a non-bailable arrest warrant for Akram for non-appearance before the court in the harassment case and adjourned the hearing until 5 January 2023.
Virality:
The tweet by @StraightOOC gained significant traction with 597,000 views, 2000 likes and 117 reposts, as of writing time.
Conclusion: Contrary to the claim, the video is of an incident which took place in Pakistan, and not India. It depicts the events from August 2021 when a female TikToker, Ayesha Akram faced harassment at Greater Iqbal Park in Lahore, on Pakistan’s Independence Day.
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