(The story was first published on 17 July 2019 and has been republished from The Quint's archives in the light of the claim resurfacing.)
CLAIM
A video which shows a man mercilessly beating a girl has been shared on Twitter by a user with a claim that the man in the video is a teacher of RM VM school in Valsad and that he is attacking his student.
The user urges the readers to share the video so that both the school and the teacher are taught a lesson.
An archived version of the tweet can be seen here.
IS THE VIDEO FROM RM VM SCHOOL IN VALSAD?
The video is neither from RM VM school nor is it from Gujarat. The video is actually from Raipur in Chhattisgarh which shows an exorcist performing an exorcism on a young girl.
On breaking down the video into several keyframes using Invid Google Chrome extension, we found out the details related to this video. We came across a news article published by Dainik Bhaskar dated 10 February 2018, which reported that the minor girl was beaten in the presence of her family members.
Subsequently we search on Google using keywords like ‘tantrik girl beaten Raipur’ and came across another video which identified the man as a pastor named Dinesh Sahu. As per this report, Sahu was arrested after the video went viral.
RM VM SCHOOL ATTACKED BY FAKE NEWS ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS
INSTANCE 1
In July 2018, another video in which a man can be seen hitting kids went viral with a claim that the incident took place at ‘RM VM’ school in Valsad.
The Quint had earlier debunked this story and found that the video is actually from an orphanage in Egypt and not RM VM school in Valsad.
The school itself had issued a clarification saying that several videos on social media, attributed to the school, were completely unrelated.
INSTANCE 2
Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani took to Twitter to share a gruesome video of a child being beaten, with the claim that the video was supposedly from RM VM school in the state's Valsad district.
The tweet contains a graphic video and an archived version can be accessed here.
The Quint had debunked this viral claim and found out that it was from Giza in Daraa, and showed a nine-year-old boy who had been kidnapped and was being tormented by an armed group, who had also demanded a ransom of almost a million dollars.
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