Video Editor: Vishal Kumar
CLAIM
A video of a naked man in a mosque is going viral on social media with the claim that it shows a Tablighi Jamaat member roaming around naked.
“तब्लीगी जमात का मुल्ला देखो नग्न होकर क्या कर रहा है ,” one such post says. (Translation: See what a Muslim from Tablighi Jamaat is doing naked.”
In the video, the man can be seen walking around naked in what appears to be a mosque, banging his head into the glass panels and breaking them, as people scream in the background to stop him.
The same video was also shared on Twitter, claiming that the incident happened in Uttar Pradesh, where a Tablighi was in isolation. This video has been viewed over 10,000 times.
The video was also shared with the same claim on Facebook.
This claim comes amid reports and unverified claims by many people that members of the Tablighi Jamaat who have been quarantined are misbehaving with nurses, spitting and in the most recent claims, walking around naked in COVID-19 isolation wards.
TRUE OR FALSE?
This claim is completely false and the incident actually happened in August 2019 in Karachi. It has nothing to do with Tablighi Jamaatis or the current outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
WHAT WE FOUND
On doing a keyword search on YouTube, we found a longer version of the same video, which had been uploaded on 25 August 2019.
The caption of the video in Urdu says that a naked man entered a mosque and damaged the place, broke the glass panes and then went and lay down in the place of the imam. The caption also states that the incident took place in Gulshan-e-Hadeed Phase 2, which the title of the video says is in Karachi.
The longer version of this video also shows a man on a bike following the naked man as he walks down the street and then enters the mosque. People can be heard and seen trying to stop him.
On pasting the Urdu caption of the video on Facebook, we came across several other pages which had uploaded the same video,.
One such page, in an Urdu description for the video, uploaded on 23 August 2019, claimed that the man who entered the Khalid bin Waleed mosque was mentally challenged and that he injured himself heavily breaking the glass. It added that people of the neighbourhood caught him and handed him over to the Steel Town police, who conducted an investigation and found that the man’s name was Shafeeq Abroo.
Further, on searching Google Images with the keywords ‘Khalid Bin Waleed mosque in Gulshan e Hadeed’, we came across another YouTube video of the same incident in inverted colours, uploaded by a channel called The Pakistan TV.
The caption of this video also stated that the man had been identified as Shafeeq Abroo and an investigation by the police had shown that he was mentally ill.
To do one more step of verification to prove that the video was not from India, we looked at photos of the mosque on Google Maps and found it was called Jamia Masjid Khalid Bin Waleed, in Karachi. We also saw that the photos matched exactly with the shot in the viral video where the naked man enters the mosque.
The blue board is the same, as is the shape of the windows.
Therefore, it is clear that the viral video has nothing to do with coronavirus and Tablighi Jamaatis, but is an old incident from Karachi in 2019. It is being shared with a false claim to defame them.
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