Claim: A video shows the private jail of Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran, where the Barkhan murder victims were kept.
Fact: The clip has no relation to Sardar Khetran, Balochistan or the Barkhan tragedy. It was first uploaded to TikTok on 14 February 2023 by @urbexkev, who confirmed to Soch Fact Check that it shows tunnels under Dover Castle in England. The Barkhan murder victims’ bodies were first found on 20 February, six days after the video was posted online.
On 6 March 2023, Facebook page ‘Loralai news’ posted a video (archive), claiming it showed the private jail of Balochistan Commutations and Works Minister Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran, who is accused of killing three individuals, including a woman.
The video — which was accompanied by the caption “عبدالرحمن کھتران کے نجی جیل کے اندر کے مناظر [Scenes from inside Abdul Rahman Khatran’s private prison]” — has been viewed more than 4.1 million times.
The 55-second clip shows a maze of seemingly underground tunnels — a wide tunnel with white and reddish-brown bricks and a narrower tunnel through a small door with stones on the wall and lining up the sides — and ends with a man holding a flashlight.
The Barkhan killings
On 20 February, authorities recovered three bodies — apparently tortured and bullet-ridden — from a well in the Haji Kot area of Balochistan’s Barkhan district, leading to an uproar on social media, according to a report (archive). Two days later, on 22 February, Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran was arrested.
The report also stated that the “victims belonged to the family of local tribesman Khan Muhammad Marri, who had accused Communications and Works Minister Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran of the murders”.
Marri alleged that his wife, Giran Naz, was also one of the deceased but the autopsy suggested otherwise and Naz, as well as four sons and a daughter, were recovered during a raid (archive).
Khetran was initially remanded into police custody but has since been released on bail against bonds worth PKR 1 million.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check reached out to Urdu News journalist Zain ud Din, who has reported on this case on the ground. Zain ud Din said he has not seen any such videos that showed the inside of the alleged private jail and that no image or footage was released. A similar raid on Khetran’s residence was conducted less than a decade ago but no media was released, although people were recovered, he added.
Zain ud Din opined that it was “difficult to get pictures of the inside” of the alleged jail but stressed that the alleged prisoners are forced to reside in servants’ quarters and that it is nothing like what one would assume the place to be; that is, a room with iron bars.
He added that people familiar with the matter who he spoke with also mentioned the same thing about servants’ quarters.
Balochistan chief minister’s coordinator Babar Khan Yousafzai termed the video as “fake” and “propaganda on social media”, claiming that “no such private jail exists” in the province.
“Balochistan Interior Minister Meer Zia Ullah Langau on 9 December wrote a letter to all the commissioners and sought a report inquiring as to whether any such private jail exists anywhere in Balochistan [but] all commissioners replied saying there is no such private jail anywhere in Balochistan,” he said, according to a voice note shared with Soch Fact Check.
Yousafzai further claimed, “This is a video from Gaza, Israel, where such a private jail exists and that video has been linked to the current situation and made viral.”
A police officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to not being authorised to talk to the media, refuted the claim, saying the video was incorrectly linked to Sardar Khetran and the Barkhan murders and that no such private jail was found at the provincial minister’s home.
Zain ud Din, the journalist, also said the existence of such a jail and digging such a long tunnel in Balochistan to keep prisoners there did not sound plausible. Moreover, none of the prisoners who were freed mentioned a private jail in their statements either.
Finding the tunnel’s location
To ascertain the origin of the video, Soch Fact Check used keyframes from the clip as input in reverse image search tools but could only narrow the location down to different mediaeval castles in Europe. We subsequently reached out to the global fact-checking community and asked for assistance in identifying the location.
RMIT ABC Fact Check Chief Investigator Gordon Farrer shared our query on Twitter, to which Anees Qureshi — an independent fact-checker — responded and ran an open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysis.
The original creator of the video has been identified as @urbexkev, who has a presence on several social media platforms, such as TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
@urbexkev posted the clip here (archive), titled “#tunnels #urbex #castle #cavesandcliffs #war urbexkev” and with Daniel Pemberton’s 2018 song for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”, The Prowler, as the background music. It has over 2.6 million views so far. They also posted a similar video (archive) with the camera moving up the stairs instead of turning right.
Using the ‘page source’ option on Google Chrome, we ascertained that the video was posted at ‘1676383079’ in Epoch Unix time in computing terms, which, when converted to Pakistan Standard Time (PST) — GMT+0500 — turns out to be 6:57 PM on 14 February 2023.
Qureshi, the independent fact-checker, also shared a link to the Subterranean History blog, which, according to its description, publishes “photographs and information about tunnels, caves, bunkers, defences, mines and other historic sites in the South of the UK and other areas.”
The blog’s page on East Demi Bastion of Dover Castle, a mediaeval castle in Dover, England, contains photos from inside the structure, including those of tunnels underneath it. Some of these images — which are also published in Dover’s Caves and Tunnels Paperback by Derek Leach — match the keyframes from the viral video claimed to show the private jail of Sardar Khetran.
Soch Fact Check also reached out to @urbexkev on Instagram, where they responded to us, saying, “All my videos are filmed in the [United Kingdom].” The urban explorer confirmed that the clip shows Dover Castle and that the person seen towards the end of the tunnel is one of their friends.
It is important to note that Soch Fact Check is not investigating if Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran has a private jail or not, as well as whether he was holding members of the public against their will in the aforementioned jails.
We can, therefore, confirm that the video is wrongly claimed to be the private jail of Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran and has no relation to the provincial minister or the Barkhan murder victims.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found the video with most traction to be this one (archive), which had over 46,000 reactions, 3,200 comments, and 4.1 million views on Facebook; however, it appears that the post is no longer available nor is the page that published it.
Other Facebook posts carrying the video can be found here, here, and here.
The clip was also shared on Twitter here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: The clip shows tunnels under the Dover Castle in England, a fact that was confirmed to Soch Fact Check by @urbexkev, who first uploaded it to TikTok on 14 February 2023 — six days before the Barkhan murder victims’ bodies were recovered. The clip has no relation to Sardar Khetran, Balochistsan or the Barkhan tragedy.
Background image in cover photo: Khetran Sahab