2020 Moradabad Video Falsely Linked to Communal Clashes in Khargone

The 2020 video shows women being arrested for pelting stones at health officials in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad.

The video was taken in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad in April 2020.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

A short clip of women being ushered into a vehicle by police personnel is going viral on social media with a claim that it shows Muslim women being arrested in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh.

The claim comes against the backdrop of the communal clashes that took place in Khargone, after stones were pelted at a Ram Navami procession on 10 April.

However, we found that the video dates back to 2020 and shows a group of women being arrested for pelting stones at health and police officials, after they arrived in the Nawabpura area in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad to take a COVID-infected man for isolation.

CLAIM

The short video is being shared to claim that it shows women being arrested in Madhya Pradesh's Khargone after the recent communal unrest in the area.

An archive of this post can be seen here.

This post by one Bhagwatsingh Rajput was viewed over 12,000 times at the time of writing this article.

The video is being widely shared on Facebook and Twitter.

More posts with the same claim can be seen here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

Using InVID, a video verification tool, we divided the video into multiple keyframes and ran a reverse image search on one of them.

The result led us to a tweet from 15 April 2020, which noted that the video showed women who had pelted stones on doctors in Moradabad being arrested.

The tweet was from 2020.

We then looked up for more details of the incident using relevant Hindi keywords, and came across a news report by Hindi news organisation Amar Ujala dated 16 April, 2020.

We found many visual similarities between the photographs carried in this video, and the video in the claim. As the 2020 tweet carried clearer visuals, we compared Amar Ujala's photographs to the video in the tweet.

In one photo, we noticed that three women who were wearing the same outfits as the women in the viral claim.

One of the women is wearing a green patterned scarf with a green kurta.

One woman dressed in a blue patterned kurta with a red scarf is seen in both stills.

In another photo from the report, we saw that the shop sign reading 'SK' and a woman with a light red scarf and a dark blue polka-dotted kurta were also visible in the viral claim.

The shop with a blue wall, next to a pole, is present in both videos.

The report stated that health officials and police personnel had gone to Moradabad's Nawabpura to test the family of a businessman who had tested positive for COVID-19.

The family had resisted the officials' instructions for testing and isolation and turned hostile, pelting stones at them.

The report further noted that six health officials, including doctors and pharmacists, had been injured in the incident.

As per a report by The Quint, 23 people had been arrested in connection to the stone-pelting incident.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had condemned the attack and said that the culprits would face action under the National Security Act and the cost of damaged public property would be recovered from them.

Clearly, an old video of women being arrested in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad in 2020 is being falsely linked to the recent clashes in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh.

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