Claim: Journalist Amir Mateen shared an old video of police brutality in the current context of political turmoil in Pakistan.
Fact: The video is from September 2019 when an SHO in Multan assaulted women on camera.
On 20 May 2023, journalist Amir Mateen shared a video on Twitter, with the caption “What’s going on here? Where is this? Who’s doing it and under whose order. Does it look like a civilised society?” In the video you can clearly see police officers beating up women and some people surrounding the scene.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check found that the video was first shared on 5 September 2019 by journalist Rauf Klasra on Twitter with the caption, “Here go the gladiators and brave hearts of Punjab—
Keep rocking guys in police uniforms..” At the same time, several other users copy-pasted the caption and shared the same video.
A reverse image search on Google based on a keyframe extracted from the video led to an old AFP India fact-check about the same footage. The article explains that the video was first published on YouTube on June 27, 2019. However, since that link is broken and the video has been removed from YouTube, we found that the Daily Jang newspaper published an article about this incident of police brutality. The Daily Jang said the Chehliyak police officer “tortured” and used violence against the women in an attempt to remove them from their shops, which were located near the district court in Multan.
Photographs of the Multan district court align with the background for the video in the claim.
Virality
This tweet reached 1,510,348 followers and received over 28,699 interactions.
Conclusion: The video of police brutality against women is from 2019 in Multan.
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