A video of a young woman being murdered brutally with an axe is being circulated on social media with the claim that it is an incident from India. However, we found that while the incident did happen, it took place in Brazil.
CLAIM
The video shows a young woman, gagged and her wrists tied, being brutally hit on the head with an axe till she dies.
(Note: Due to the distressing nature of the visuals, The Quint is not displaying the video in the story.)
We found that a Twitter user had shared the video, claiming that it was from India.
“Humanity is dead. This is barbaric, sad, and shocking. Is he an executioner? I request all the country’s police to punish him in the same way,” the message said.
The Twitter user also tagged UP Police among others in his tweet.
The video was also shared on Facebook with a similar claim insinuating that it could be from India.
WHAT WE FOUND
We broke up the video into several keyframes using Invid and ran a reverse search on them. This led us to a thread on Reddit where the video had been shared with the information that it showed a woman being killed in Brazil.
We then tried searching the web for news about a woman being killed with an axe in Brazil. No relevant results were yielded by a search with English words, so we ran a search with “mulher morta com machado”, Portuguese for “woman killed with an axe”.
When we searched Facebook with these keywords, we came across a post by a Facebook page called “Feminicídio - Parem de nos matar”. The page had uploaded a post on 1 September which said that a 23-year-old woman by the name of Thalia Torres de Souza had been murdered over the preceding weekend.
According to the post, the incident had taken place in Granja Portugal, Fortaleza, in Brazil and that the body bore signs of an extremely violent death, probably caused by axe blows to the head.
Further, we ran a keyword search on Facebook using her name and came across a post by a page called Aracati Polícia 24hs. This post carried the same information as well as a photo of the body of the woman, which we saw was dressed in the same clothes as the woman in the viral video.
Further, on running a search with the name on Google, we came across a news article by an outlet called CNews on the same incident.
Therefore, it is clear that a video of a woman being killed in a brutal manner in Brazil is being shared with the false claim that it happened in India.
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