Posts about 'knife-wielding man in India's Uttar Pradesh' show video from different state
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on February 23, 2023 at 10:19
- Updated on February 27, 2023 at 02:39
- 3 min read
- By Anuradha PRASAD, AFP India
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The graphic video, which shows a man wielding a knife before a crowd of onlookers, has more than 9,000 views in a Facebook post shared on February 17.
Police officers approach the man and appear to tell him to drop the weapon before shots are fired and they beat him with batons as he lies on the ground.
"Excellent. Abdul shot in Uttar Pradesh, the realm of Yogi Baba. He was issuing open threats in the market," the Hindi-language post says.
'Abdul' is a pejorative term for Muslims, who have complained of discrimination and harassment under India's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.
'Yogi Baba' refers to the BJP's Yogi Adityanath, who is chief minister of India's most populous state Uttar Pradesh.
The Gujarati-language Facebook post adds: "When will the Gujarat government do this? Gujarat police should learn from this."
The same video was shared in similar posts on Facebook here and here and on Twitter here and here.
Social media users appeared to believe the footage showed an incident in Uttar Pradesh, praising the state government and the police for apprehending the man quickly.
South India shooting
A keyword search on Google found a screenshot of the video in an article that said the incident happened in Karnataka.
Karnataka is a state in southern India, while Uttar Pradesh is in the north, bordering Nepal.
"Man Shot At By Police In Karnataka’s Kalaburagi After He Threatens Passersby With Knife," reads the headline of the india.com report from February 6.
According to the report, police shot the man in the leg at a market in the city of Kalaburgi.
The report includes a tweet by journalist Imran Khan, who posted footage of the drama filmed from a slightly different angle.
"Shootout at #Kalaburagi #Karnataka," he wrote in the tweet posted on February 6.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video shared in false posts (left) and the video posted by the journalist on Twitter (right), with the man in a black vest wielding a knife and police officers dressed in khaki uniforms highlighted by AFP:
The Kalaburagi city police commissioner confirmed that the incident in the video took place in Kalaburagi.
"A man named Mohammed Fazal was waving a knife in front of the police in an open market, so had to open fire and catch him," he told AFP on February 21.
The incident was widely covered by media including The News Minute and Times Now.
February 27, 2023 This article was amended to correct the attribution of a news headline in the 12th paragraph.
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