CLAIM
Indian wrestler Yogeshwar Dutt shared a video on Monday, 19 August, with the claim that the man in the video had allegedly abducted children in order to sell their organs. He further urged that the government should take strict steps to identify such people. The tweet was viewed over 16,000 times till the time this article was written.
In the video, a man can be heard saying that they have caught a boy who had accepted that he abducts children.
The archived version of the tweet can be viewed here.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The superintendent of police of Jalaun district, where the incident took place, denied that the man in the video had kidnapped children. He told The Quint that the man was beaten and then forced to say that he had kidnapped children.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We did a YouTube search using the key words ‘बच्चा चोरी पकड़ा लकड़ी बाँधा’ and found a video which had been published on Sunday, 18 August. This video is a longer version of the one shared by Yogeshwar Dutt.
In this video, the man who allegedly kidnapped children clearly mentions that he is standing in Ait which is a town in Jalaun district in Uttar Pradesh, at 0:28 seconds. He further says that he abducts children to sell their organs.
The SP of Jalaun district told The Quint that the man who is being alleged to have kidnapped children was drunk, and had been beaten before the video was shot.
“This incident is almost a week old. In the video, he was forced to accept that he had kidnapped children. The men who had beaten him had forced him to say so. He had not kidnapped any children. We have arrested the man who had beaten and forced him. The man who has been arrested had accepted his crime.”SP, Jalaun District
The Jalaun police had shared the details of the incident on their official Twitter handle on 14 August.
PAST INSTANCES OF CHILD-LIFTING RUMOURS
- An image on social media had claimed that a group of 25 men had been arrested in Jaora city, in Madhya Pradesh’s Ratlam district, for abducting children. Ratlam Superintendent of Police Gaurav Tiwari told The Quint that the men seen in the photo had not been arrested for kidnapping children. On 14 July, as many as 15 men, along with 8 women were arrested as they were involved in a sex racket.
- A video on social media had claimed that a man, allegedly by the name of ‘Shamsher’, had kidnapped children. The video shows a group of people questioning the man about details of the number of children he has kidnapped, the amount of money he gets to do the same, who his boss is and where he kidnapped the children from. An official in the Mandideep police station told The Quint that the man in the video had not kidnapped any children and is differently abled.
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