Old Thailand assault video resurfaces with false claim it shows 'Uyghur man beaten in China'

Published on July 7, 2023 at 10:55
3 min read
By Devesh MISHRA, AFP India

A video of a man being assaulted in a room has been shared thousands of times in social media posts that falsely claim the victim belonged to China's minority Muslim Uyghur community and had been attacked for praying in public. The clip -- which has been shared repeatedly alongside various false claims -- is in fact from an incident involving a monetary dispute at a loan company in Thailand in 2020, not China.

Warning: violent footage

The video was shared here on Twitter on June 27, 2023, where it was retweeted more than 3,000 times.

The 20-second video shows a kneeling man being kicked repeatedly by another person.

"Prayers and religious practices are not allowed in public places in China. A Muslim Uyghur was brutally thrashed by a man from another community while offering namaz in a public place in China," the Hindi-language caption reads.

Namaz refers to obligatory prayers performed by Muslims.

An estimated one million Uyghurs, Hui and other Muslim minorities have been detained in China's western Xinjiang region since 2017 under a government campaign that the United States and rights groups have called a genocide (archived link). Beijing denies the accusations, describing the facilities as vocational centres designed to curb extremism.

Screenshot of the false post taken on July 5, 2023

India's minority Muslim community have also faced a rising number of vigilante attacks by Hindu mobs emboldened under the rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which came to power in 2014 (archived link).

Right-wing Hindu groups have tried to prevent Muslims from praying in public spaces and one group faced arrest for performing Namaz in a newly opened mall in 2022 (archived link).

The video has been shared alongside a similar false claim on Facebook here and here, and on Twitter here.

The clip is in fact from Thailand in 2020 and the assault was related to a monetary dispute.

Thailand assault

A combination of reverse image and keyword searches on Google found the same video featured in a news report by Thai news organisation Channel 3 here on its official YouTube channel, uploaded on December 3, 2020 (archived link).

The report is titled: "Man admits to involvement in loan shark gang, assaulted and bedridden for 3 days after he was unable to collect money from a client."

Channel 3's initial report stated the attack took place in January 2020 in the central Thai province of Nonthaburi following a dispute between the victim and his employer about money.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the clip from Channel 3's news report (right):

Screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the clip from Channel 3's news report (right)

At the report's three-second mark, the news anchor says: "[Police] finally found the man who was physically assaulted by his boss because he collected an informal loan and didn't give it to the employer."

Other Thai news reports of the assault from that time included images taken from the video, such as here and here. Another Thai media report here states the man was beaten for embezzling money from his employer, a loan company (archived links here, here and here).

The same video has circulated alongside a different claim it shows a Chinese man beating an Indonesian national, debunked by AFP here in September 2022.

Police colonel Witthaya Bowonsikharin, who led the investigation into the assault, told AFP on September 9, 2022 that the man being attacked in the video was a Thai national, and officers had already made charges in the case.

"The man who was physically assaulted collected loan money from a client but didn’t give it back to the company, so the employer hit him," he said.

AFP has also debunked false claims the video shows a Chinese man who fell prey to a job scam in Myanmar.

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