A disturbing video showing a man violently flinging a girl to the ground in Kerala's Kasargod has gone viral on the internet with false communal claims.
What does the video show?: The video shows a man walking towards the girl and lifting her, and flinging her to the ground. The girl can be seen wearing a hijab.
What is the claim?: The claim with the viral video, which, when translated from Arabic, read, "In the Indian State of Kerala, an extremist Hindu brutally beats up an Indian Muslim girl (18 years) just because she was on her way to her Islamic school".
A post with the viral video.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
The claim was shared with a hashtag "#IndianMuslimsUnderAttack" and was shared widely on Facebook and Twitter.
(Note: We have refrained from adding any archive links due to the distressing nature of the visuals.)
What is the truth?: We found that the claim was false. The person who attacked the girl was called Aboobacker Siddique and belonged to the Muslim community.
How did we find that out?: We used the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension to extract keyframes from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search on some of them. While going through the search results, we found the following:
A news report in a digital news organisation, The News Minute, from 19 November, titled, "Kerala man caught on cam flinging eight-yr-old girl to the ground, arrested".
The report said that a 34-year-old man was arrested for violently flinging an eight-year-old girl to the ground in Kasargod, Kerala.
The report further added that the man was identified as the girl's neighbour Aboobacker Siddique.
He was arrested by the police and was charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and section 9 and 10 of the Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.
We found similar reports in The Times of India and India Today.
What did the police say?: We contacted Santhosh Kumar, Inspector of Police from Manjeshwar Police station, Kerala, and he confirmed Siddique's arrest. He also added that the reason for the attack was not confirmed.
Conclusion: An incident of abuse against a minor in Kerala was given a false communal spin.
(Note: The story has been edited to add the name of the police personnel from Manjeshwar police station)
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