An old video of a huge crowd gathered for a funeral procession in Chechnya has gone viral with the claim that it shows the body of the Chechen teenager, who beheaded a teacher in Paris, being brought back to his origin country.
The video is actually from 2018 and shows the funeral of Yusup Temirkhanov, the man accused of killing a former colonel of the Russian army, Yuri Budanov.
CLAIM
The video was shared with the claim, “The Chechen youth who shot and killed Samuel, the teacher who insulted the Prophet Muhammadh in France, was shot dead by the police there! His body was brought to Chechnya and buried (sic),” in both English and Urdu.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
The video is from 2018, two years before the Chechen teen was shot by the French Police for the beheading of Samuel Paty, a French teacher.
A reverse image search of the keyframes of the video led us to a report on news site, Caucasian Knot, dated 5 August 2018.
The report states that Yusup Temirkhanov, who was serving a sentence in the Omsk colony for the murder of Yuri Budanov, had died in the hospital of natural causes. Tens of thousands of people gathered in the village of Geldagan, to take part in the funeral.
A keyword search of the same led us to a video uploaded by Russian magazine Spectrum on Facebook, which shows the visuals similar to the viral video.
We also found a news report by Russian state-owned news agency RIA on the funeral of Temirkhanov, which was also attended by Chechan state head, Ramzan Kadyrov.
According to the report, Kadyrov stated that there was “strong evidence” that the deceased was not involved in the death of a Russian serviceman and he would have the “unfair sentence” reviewed.
BBC had also reported about the killing of Budanov back in 2011 and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty covered the funeral of Temirkhanov in 2018.
Evidently, an old video from 2018 has been falsely shared as the funeral procession for the Chechen teen who had killed the French teacher over a controversial cartoon on Prophet Mohammed.
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