A video showing a man dressed in military uniform, catching a snake with his bare hands is being shared on social media platforms.
What is the claim?: Those sharing have claimed that it shows the Poonch's encounter site where four Indian Army soldiers lost their lives, recently.
What happened in Poonch?: Five Indian Army soldiers were martyred in combat against militants in Poonch in Jammu and Kashmir on 21 December.
An archive of the post can be found here.
(Source: X/Screenshot)
This post recorded 30.1K views at the time of writing this story.
(Archives of similar claims can be found here and here)
Is this true?: This claim is false.
The clip shows a training video of an Indonesian soldier belonging to the Indonesian Special Armed Forces called Komando Pasukan Khusus or Kopassus. The video is from 2021.
How did we find out?: We divided the viral video into several keyframes and came across a YouTube channel named Calon Prajurit which translates to 'candidate soldier' from Indonesian to English.
It was a longer video which was uploaded on 14 September 2021 and showed the same soldier in the viral video catching the snake with his hands.
Here are the similarities between the two frames.
(Source: Altered by The Quint)
The video was uploaded with the caption that read "TNI SI HANTA RIMBA" in Indonesian. When translated to English, it meant, 'TNI The Ghost Of The Jungle.'
We found out that TNI stands for 'Tentara Nasional Indonesia', that is, Indonesian National Armed Forces.
About TNI: Hanta Rimba is a name for the armed forces group in Indonesia, which is known as the the Komando Pasukan Khusus or Kopassus.
An article by InfoPublik also described Kopassus as 'Indonesia's Pride of the Jungle Ghost'.
It is a special forces command group that is trained in intelligence gathering, a variety of special operations techniques, sabotage, and airborne and seaborne landings, according to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Intelligence Resource Program.
The YouTube channel included videos of the armed forces where they can be seen indulging with snakes.
One such video shows the soldiers where they have caught the snakes by their heads and seem to be drinking a liquid from the reptile. The video's caption reads, "Suck! Eat the Snake TNI" in English.
The viral video has been shared before with the claim that it shows an Indian Army soldier with a snake. We found the oldest version from 2021 on YouTube.
Conclusion: The video does not show the Poonch encounter site where four Indian army soldiers lost their lives. It shows Indonesia's special armed command force, Kopassus's soldier with a snake.
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