Claim: A video shows pills found inside cakes by Turkish brand Luppo to subtly “sterilise” Muslim children in Pakistan.
Fact: The video is old and not related to Pakistan. The company has refuted the claims and provided laboratory results showing its products are not contaminated. The image of a girl child accompanying one of the posts on Facebook is also misleading since it shows a child who was found lost following an Independence Day event in August 2022.
On 31 December 2022, Facebook user ‘Shahzaib Khan Offical (Prince)’ posted a Reel of a person unwrapping what appears to be a confectionery product called Luppo. The individual then crumbles up the cake and shows two round white-coloured tablets.
The Reel is captioned as follows:
“یہ ایک نیا کیک مارکیٹ میں آیا ہے اس کا نام لوپو کمپنی lupo ہے
اس کیک میں گولیاں ہیں جو بچوں کو مفلوج کرنے والی گولی ہے
براہے مہربانی اس ویڈیو کو اپنے دوستوں کو بھجیں
یہ صرف مسلم علاقے میں فروخت ہو رہی ہے
اپنا اور اپنے بچوں کا خیال رکھیں شکریہ
سٹی ھزارہ نیوز
[There is a new cake in the market called lupo company lupo
This cake contains pills that are sterilising pills for children
Please send this video to your friends
It is only sold in Muslim areas
Take care of yourself and your children thank you
City Hazara News]”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check used some of the words from the text in the Reel’s caption alongside “City Hazara News” and found the same video on Facebook page ‘City Hazara News’; the clip has gained over 190,000 views and been shared more than 12,000 times.
The Reel posted by ‘Shahzaib Khan Offical (Prince)’ is cut off towards the end, effectively cutting off the voice of someone who speaks in Sorani, a Kurdish language, as identified by Open.online and Teyit — both signatories of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). However, the ‘City Hazara News’ post does have the remaining portion.
We also identified another product seen in the background as Aspiliç, which is frozen meat by the Turkish company As Tavukçuluk.
Soch Fact Check was able to identify two other factors that hint at the pills being inserted later on. The first is that while the individual showing the cakes shows two units at the start, they do not show the other side of the third pack they open, which means that we cannot be certain if it was opened and resealed before the clip was made.
The second factor is observed if the video is slowed down to 0.5x or 0.25x speed, showing two holes through which the pills could have been inserted by whoever shot the clip. Interestingly, the pills also come out from almost the same place where the holes can be seen.
It is also noteworthy that only someone with prior knowledge of where the pills are would be able to find them so quickly and accurately; therefore, it is likely the individual who made the video who put them there.
Furthermore, if the pills were inserted by the manufacturer, they would have melted during the baking process.
Soch Fact Check also accessed a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) on ‘Terrorist Threats in Food’, which states that most substances used to deliberately contaminate eatables include toxic drugs and chemicals, microbiological pathogens, pesticides, radiological materials, radionuclear substances, heavy metals, and other chemicals.
The complete book titled ‘Terrorist Threats to Food: Guidance for Establishing and Strengthening Prevention and Response Systems’ also states, “The agents used could have acute effects, resulting in death, paralysis or vomiting, or long-term consequences, such as fetal abnormalities and increased rates of chronic illness such as cancer.”
We also found that the current Luppo offering — here and here — is not the same as the one in the viral video. According to Teyit, Şölen does not have a product with “this brand and packaging that is sold to the Turkish domestic market” and that the company has shared with the publication the laboratory results of the Luppo Choco Coconut Cake.
“The production processes of food products undergo both internal and independent inspection. No findings were found in the laboratory results of independent inspectors for Şölen Chocolate,” the publication says.
Journalists working in the Kurdish regions in 2019 told Teyit that it was likely the video was made as part of a boycott campaign “launched against Turkish goods in Northern Iraq”. This also corresponds to disinformation spread due to the Turkish-Kurdish conflict.
Interestingly, Soch Fact Check also came across clearer photos in a Kurdish website article, but the pills shown appear to be larger than the ones in the viral video.
Apart from Open.online and Teyit, other IFCN-accredited organisations that have debunked the claims include Snopes, AFP Sri Lanka, Fact Crescendo, The Quint, The Logical Indian, Factly, Newsmobile, Alt News, and BOOM Live.
These articles detail how the claim spread in multiple countries with different claims and warnings such as the pills causing paralysis, hallucinations, polio, permanent cerebral palsy, other diseases, and negative impact on children’s brain and intelligence. They also mention that Sölen was at the time seeking legal action against those responsible for the viral clip.
According to Snopes, “Medically, it is not possible for a drug to induce cerebral palsy in an otherwise healthy child or adult.”
The publication also obtained a statement from the company spokesperson, who termed the footage “delusive, groundless and false”, saying it was made “entirely with the object of defamation”. They also explained that there are various filtration systems used in the cake’s production — which is entirely automated — and particles larger than 700 micrometres (0.7 millimetres) in height or width are blocked.
The Logical Indian notes that the company has “released evidence related to the safety standards and certifications of the plant’s manufacturing process, including where the Luppo coconut cream cake was manufactured” and that the checks were conducted by SGS, a Swiss company that provides inspection, testing, verification, and certification services.
The video has circulated in Sri Lanka in the past and was then debunked by AFP Fact Check for the Asia-Pacific region. The publication spoke to Şölen’s regional export manager, Oktay Dogan, who said the video showing paralytic pills hidden inside its cakes “has been made for the sole purpose of defamation and it is entirely baseless”.
“Since the posts circulated online in 2019, Şölen has meticulously pursued the matter and even initiated legal action in Iraq where the misleading posts originated,” Dogan had told AFP.
The publication also shared the laboratory results mentioned on Teyit posted on the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) website, where it is marked as having “scored the highest possible grade in the Brand Reputation through Compliance of Global Standards (BRCGS) grading system”.
With regard to the picture of a child claimed to have been affected by the pill-laced cakes published in this Facebook post, we reverse-searched the image and found it in a tweet carrying a screenshot of a WhatsApp message along with the following caption:
“یہ چھوٹی سی بچی جو تقریباً پانچ سال کی ہے، لکی ون مال سے 14 اگست 2022 کو کراچی سے ملی ہے۔
بہت انتظار کیا گیا مگر کوئی لینے نہیں آیا ۔
اسوقت یہ بچی فیڈرل بی انڈسٹریل ایریا پولیس سٹیشن کراچی میں موجود ہے۔ بچی اپنا نام اور اپنے ماں باپ کا نام نہیں بنا سکتی۔
تمام احباب التماس ہے کہ اس کو شئر کریں۔ شکریہ
[This little girl, who is about five years old, was found at Lucky One Mall on 14 August 2022 in Karachi.
We waited a long time but no one came for her.
At present this girl is in Federal B Industrial Area Police Station Karachi. The girl cannot tell her name or the name of her parents. All friends are requested to share this. Thanks]”
We used combined some keywords — “چھوٹی بچی لکی ون مال کراچی سے ملی ہے” — and used them as a search phrase on Twitter to tally if the girl’s picture was shared with the same caption on the same dates; we found it to be correct through these results.
Other similar photos of pills being found in cakes in Iran surfaced here in 2019 by a Moroccan user and here in 2020 by an Indian user. However, these photos and the associated claims have been investigated and debunked by Iranian websites, such as Tasnim News Agency, Mehr News Agency, and Euronews Persian, as well as Khabar Online, which stated on its verified Twitter account that Iranian authorities have said they did not find any such pills in the cakes.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis using the following search terms:
- “کیک مارکیٹ لوپو”
- “Market mein ek naya CAKE aaya hai”
The first search term turned up 3,577 interactions across 63 posts on Facebook in the period between 1 December 2022 and 30 January 2023. When we expanded our search to the previous year, we found that the video had also surfaced in December 2021, thereby showing 6,041 interactions across 186 Facebook posts.
The second term turned up just over a dozen Facebook posts with 75 interactions for the period between 30 Jan 2019 and 30 January 2023.
The clip has surfaced numerous times in the past, including in January 2020, August 2022, and January 2023.
It was shared here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here on YouTube, here and here on Twitter, and here on Instagram.
We also found links to the video from January 2020 here, here, here, here, here, and here on Facebook.
Conclusion: The video is old and not related to Pakistan. The company has refuted the claims and provided laboratory results showing its products are not contaminated. The image of a girl accompanying one of the posts on Facebook is also misleading since it, in fact, shows a child who was found lost following an Independence Day event in August 2022.
Background image in cover photo: Babs Gorniak