Video Shows Protest Outside Nawaz Sharif’s House After Imran Khan’s Arrest? No!

The video could be traced back to April 2022 and is unrelated to the arrest of former Pakistani PM Imran Khan.

Fact-Check | This video of people protesting on the streets is old and not recent as claimed.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A video which shows a massive crowd gathered on the streets is being shared on the internet following the arrest of former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan.

What are users claiming?: Those sharing it have claimed that the visuals are from London where people were protesting outside former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif over the arrest of Khan.

Who shared the claim?: Several users, including Ashok Swain, shared a similar claim.

An archive of the post can be seen here.

(More archives to similar claims can be found here, here, and here.)

But...: The visuals of the protest could be traced back to at least April 2022, when several Pakistani people gathered outside Sharif's house to show support for Khan when he was ousted as the PM.

What led us to the truth?: Using InVID, a Google Chrome extension, we divided the video into several keyframes and performed a reverse image search on them.

• A Yandex search led us to the same video uploaded on Twitter by a user named Kamran Khan.

• The video was uploaded on 1 November 2022.

• Taking this forward, we performed a keyword search and came across a report published in The Express Tribune - a Pakistani daily - on 17 April 2022.

• The report mentioned that people of Pakistani origin protested outside Sharif's and Khan's former wife Jemima Goldsmith's residences.

• The protest came after Khan was ousted in a parliamentary no-confidence vote on 9 April 2022.

• It also had some tweets which carried the visuals from the protest which looked similar to viral video.

• When we compared an image from the report to a keyframe of the viral video, we found that both of them are from the same incident.

A comparison clearly shows the similarities.

Other reports: A report in The Sun said that the residents on London's Dunraven Street often witness protests.

• It mentioned that the protests are usually held in front of Avenfield House, where Sharif resides with his family.

• The report also carried similar visuals as seen in the viral video.

The report was published on 22 April 2023.

Geolocating the street: Using the street view option of Google Maps, we tried geolocating the place where the protests happened.

• The view is from October 2022 and shows some similarities.

Imran Khan's arrest: Khan was arrested on 9 May in connection with the Al-Qadir Trust Case by Rangers outside the Islamabad High Court.

• This triggered violence in several regions of the country.

Conclusion: It is clear that an old and unrelated video is being shared to claim that it shows a protest after the recent arrest of Khan.

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