A video that shows a woman wearing a mask coming out of a police station with media persons quizzing her is being shared on social media to claim that she is journalist Rana Ayyub who has been arrested following the money laundering allegations against her.
On 10 February, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) provisionally attached Rs 1.77 crore belonging to Ayyub. The case is based on an FIR which alleges that Ayyub had been "illegally acquiring money from the general public in the name of charity".
However, the video which is being circulated linking it to her arrest is old and not related to this case. The video dates back to July 2021 when Ayyub had visited the Loni border police station in Ghaziabad to record her statement in the Loni assault video case that was shared by the journalist.
Ayyub also told The Quint that the video is from the time when she had stepped out of the Loni police station.
CLAIM
The video is being shared with the claim in Hindi that reads, "विदेशी पैसे ले कर पत्रकारिता के नाम पर देश में अफवाह और नफरत फैलाने वाली राणा अयूब धर ली गयी है, 1.77 करोड़ रुपए ED ने किए अटैच, मनी लॉन्ड्रिंग का आरोप."
(Translation: Rana Ayyub, who spreads rumours and hatred in the country in the name of journalism by taking foreign money, has been arrested. ED has accused her of money laundering attaching Rs 1.77 crore.)
An archive of the tweet can be seen here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND
With the help of InVid, a video verification tool, we extracted the keyframes from the video and conducted a reverse image search on some of them.
A Google reverse image search result led us to a Facebook video posted by a user on 2 July 2021.
The video caption read that Ayyub had visited the Loni police station in Ghaziabad.
An archive of the Facebook post can be seen here.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
Next, we searched with keywords to look for news reports about Ayyub's visit to the police station.
A news report by media house ETV Bharat from 2 July 2021 read that the senior journalist had recorded her statement at the Loni border police station in connection with the video of assault on a 72-year-old man. She was questioned for two hours, the report read.
We then got in touch with Ayyub who told us, "I was stepping out of Loni police station after recording my statement in the case. A case was registered against me, Zubair and Saba for our tweet about the Muslim man whose beard was chopped off."
She also added that she is currently at her home.
WHAT WAS THE LONI INCIDENT?
The Ghaziabad police had filed an FIR in 2021 against nine entities, on the charges of inciting communal disharmony for sharing a video. The names included Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking website Alt-News, journalist Saba Naqvi among others.
The video showed a 72-year-old man being beaten up by a group of men, who allegedly made him chant “Jai Shri Ram,” and forcibly chopped off his beard. However, the police stated that the allegation of him being made to chant religious slogans is untrue.
The police had stated, “The following entities – The Wire, Rana Ayyub, Mohammad Zubair, Dr Shama Mohammed, Saba Naqvi, Maskoor Usmani, Salman Nizami – without checking the fact, started giving communal colour to the incident on Twitter and suddenly they started spreading messages to disrupt the peace and bring differences between the religious communities.”
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