Karachi protest over Imran Khan’s ouster did not attract 200,000 people

Claim: Over 200,000 people attended a protest held in Karachi on 11 April 2022, following former prime minister Imran Khan’s removal from office.

Fact: In addition to sourcing comments from on-the-ground witnesses, Soch Fact Check used tools such as Map Checking to investigate the claim. Our most liberal estimate suggests that just over 100,000 people attended the protest.

On 11 April 2022, Facebook user ‘Syed Daniyal Ahmed Jilani’ shared a video of a protest outside Millenium Mall in Karachi’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal area following Imran Khan’s ouster as the prime minister of Pakistan.

The caption accompanying the post claimed that there were “more than 200,000 people” at the protest, which followed Khan’s call for countrywide demonstrations over his removal from power.

“IMRAN KHAN THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE DONE,” Jilani, the Facebook user, added in their post.

Fact or fiction?

Soch Fact Check investigated the number of people at the protest by conducting a crowd density analysis, as well as speaking to a number of witnesses who attended the protest.

We used Map Checking — a tool recommended by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies that estimates and fact-checks the maximum number of people standing in a given area — to arrive at an estimated number of people present at the PTI’s Millennium Mall protest. The estimate was calculated by comparing footage of the protest to graphics made by crowd science expert, Professor Dr GK Still.

The Millennium Mall falls at the intersection of National Stadium Road and Rashid Minhas Road, with Nueplex Cinemas, a Shell petrol station, and a McDonald’s outlet on the east side. We observed the area covered by the protesters as confined to the street between Super Salateen and Afridi Inn towards the west, New Noorani Restaurant towards the north-west, and Abdullah Traders towards the south-east. Based on our estimates, the surface area of the protest zone was approximately 45,154 square metres (486,034 square feet), as per the area we demarcated on Map Checking.

We estimated that the protest zone ranged from ‘Crowded’ to ‘Packed’, with an approximate crowd density of 1.75 people per square metre (approximately 10 square feet). This was in light of the fact that the individuals at the protest were not evenly distributed — protesters were more spread out on the edges of the protest zone, while the area near the stage was heavily packed. It is also important to note that density is likely to appear higher in lower closed-circuit television (CCTV) angles.

Based on the above estimates, the number of people at the protest site at any given point was 79,019. However, it is important to consider that the crowd fluctuated throughout the night; therefore, to generate a more liberal estimate, Soch Fact Check added an additional 25% above the total number of protesters multiplied the initial estimate number by 1.25x, which resulted in a final estimate of 98,774 people.

This figure includes those who were standing in the parking lots of the restaurants lined up at the start of National Stadium Road, as well as Millennium Mall, Saima Mall, and Saima Square One Towers, and a portion of the free space outside McDonalds and Shell.

The figure 98,774 is less than 50% of the 200,000 figure claimed in the Facebook post.

Soch Fact Check also adopted a second approach to investigate the claim, involving the following calculations:

• Total demarcated area: 45,154 sqm
• Area with crammed crowd: 10,688 sqm
• Ratio of area with crammed crowd to total demarcated area: 10,688 / 45,154 = 23.7%
• Crowd density of the area showing the crammed crowd: 3.50 people per sqm
• Crowd density of the remaining area: 1.25 people per sqm

By applying a weightage of 23.7% : 76.3%, we arrived at the following:

• (3.5 * 0.237) + (1.25 * 0.763) = 1.78325 people per sqm.

Then, multiplying the total protest area with they people per sqm gave us an estimate of the total number of people present, as follows:

• 1.78325 * 45,154 = 80,520.8705 ~ 80,521 people

As we did above, we added an additional 25% above the total number of protesters considering that a portion of the crowd left midway and others arrived later on, we multiplied the initial estimate number by 1.25x, which resulted in a final estimate of 100,652 people.

The figure 100,652 is half — 50.3% — of the 200,000 figure claimed in the Facebook post.

In addition to the above calculations, Soch Fact Check spoke to people at the protest site.

Soch Fact Check spoke to Urdu News reporter Zain Ali who was present at the protest. Ali, who was in Gulshan-e-Jamal, a neighbourhood across the Millennium Mall, said he thinks there were “around 10,000 people” there.

Aleem Zahid Khan, another individual from the site of the demonstration, said that since there were large groups also on the Shaheen Shinwari and Johar Mor sides, there were 20,000 people at one time. When asked if it was possible that there were 200,000 protesters, he said he did not think so.

Khan, however, added that people were coming and going; therefore, “if you want the estimate of the total number of people [who] attended that protest, [it] was around 35,000 to 40,000”.

Arab News correspondent Naimat Khan told Soch Fact Check that while the number of protesters could be in thousands, the crowd size could not have been above 10,000.

Soch Fact Check also contacted a PTI loyalist, Sumaiya, who was at the protest site from 10 PM to 3 AM. She said her estimate was 150,000-175,000 protesters, given that people were leaving midway and others were joining later on.

Hamna Iqbal Baig, a Soch Fact Check team member who was present at the demonstration, estimated the crowd to be between 50,000-100,000 people.

Lastly, local media outlets such as Samaa English and Dawn, as well as international ones such as Al Jazeera and Arab News, described the protest as featuring a “sizable crowd”, as well as having a “large number of PTI workers and supporters”, “more than 20,000 people”, and “tens of thousands of people”, respectively.

Given that the most liberal estimate stands at 100,446, and more conservative estimates hover around 20,000-40,000 people, the claim that there were more than 200,000 people at the Millennium Mall protest by the PTI is false.

Virality

Soch Fact Check found that the post in question has so far gained more than 3,300 views and been shared more than 150 times.

Conclusion: The claim that there were over 200,000 people at the 11 April 2022 Millennium Mall protest organised by the PTI is false. Soch Fact Check used methods such as Map Checking to investigate the claim, in addition to speaking with people who attended the protest. The most liberal crowd size estimate stands at just over 100,000 people.